by David Lodge
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Dedication
Title Page
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Three
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Four
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Five
Chapter Nine
Epilogue
Afterword
Copyright
About the Book
When it isn’t prison, it’s hell.
Or at least that’s the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike ‘Ginger’ Brady. For this is the British Army in the days of National Service, a grimy deposit of postwar gloom. An endless round of kit layout, square-bashing, shepherd’s pie ‘made with real shepherds’ and drills are relieved only by the occasional lecture on fire-arms or V.D. The reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to survive this two-year confiscation of their freedom, with dramatic consequences.
About the Author
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks…, Author, Author, Deaf Sentence and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
ALSO BY DAVID LODGE
Fiction
The Picturegoers
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
Changing Places
How Far Can You Go?
Small World
Nice Work
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks…
Author, Author
Deaf Sentence
A Man of Parts
Criticism
Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin
Essays
Write On
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
Consciousness and the Novel
The Year of Henry James
Drama
The Writing Game
Home Truths
FOR MARY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The coarseness of soldiers’ speech and behaviour is a well-known fact, the representation of which I found necessary to my purpose in this novel. Readers likely to find such representation disturbing or distasteful are warned.
I am very grateful for the assistance, on points of information, of Dr G. Billington, Arthur Harris, John Jordan, Marcus Lefebure, and a Regular Army officer who would, I am sure, prefer to remain nameless. None of these gentlemen is responsible for any errors or improbabilities which remain in the book.
The characters (including the narrator) and the action of the story are fictitious; but in the reference to the Lane Bequest picture I have associated my fictitious characters with an actual event, the true details of which are unknown to me.
D.L.
Ginger, you’re barmy,
You’ll never join the Army,
You’ll never be a scout,
With your shirt hanging out,
Ginger, you’re barmy.
PROLOGUE
IT IS STRANGE to read what I wrote three years ago. It is like reading another man’s writing. Things have certainly not worked out as I expected. Or did I deliberately prevent them from so working out? I suppose my present circumstances derive, ultimately, from that visit to the w.c. on the train to London; but I am still not sure what I meant by it. I only remember that I felt I had to do something. At any rate, I take no credit for the action, for I regretted it bitterly later. If I take any credit at all, if I think any better of myself now, than I now think of myself then,—as I portray myself in these pages,—it is because I think I have realized that a deterministic conception of character and individual destiny is the subtlest of temptations that dissuade a man conscious of his own defects and others’ needs from doing anything about them. I don’t think I am a better person, or even a happier one; but perhaps there has been a small advance. I could never again write so unflattering an account of myself as the following, because it would open up so many awful possibilities of amendment. The whole story reeks of a curiously inverted, inviolable conceit.
It reeks too, for me, of the sweet, sickly smell of seaweed which hung about the Mediterranean resort where, in its original, shorter, unpolished version, it was written. Written in a confessional outpouring, at every moment that could be spared,—and at many that could not be spared without impoliteness. Written on beaches where the sun curled the paper and dried the ink as it flowed from the nib; written in the stifling bedroom of the pension while the rest of the world slumbered through the siesta; written far into the night by the erratic light of a naked bulb that swung from the impact of bulky moths.
I say ‘confessional’ because, though there was little contrition about it, the impulse that drove me on to write, which welded the pen to my aching fingers for so many hours, was not a literary one. It was only when I returned to England, and re-read the sweat-stained, sand-dusted pages, that the demon Form began to whisper in my ear about certain alterations and revisions, particularly the aesthetic advantages of concentrating my time at Badmore into a few days, and recounting my weeks at Catterick in a series of flash-backs. And so, what had started out as an attempt to record and confront my own experience subtly changed into an agreeable exercise in the manipulation of bits of observed life. I became a voyeur spying on my own experience.
Even now, it seems, I am not immune from the insinuations of Form. It occurs to me that these notes, which I am jotting down on this momentous morning, might usefully form a prologue and epilogue to the main story…
ONE
‘I FEEL WORN out. I think I’ll get ready for bed,’ said Pauline.
‘O.K.’
This was the ritual. Ostensibly it meant that she could go to bed as soon as I left to catch the 12.15 coach back to Badmore. In fact it lent an added intimacy and excitement to our regular necking sessions last thing on Sunday nights. She took her nightclothes into the kitchenette, and I heard the taps running and the flare of the gas jet under the kettle. Pauline was very hygienic. Because there was only one bathroom to the whole house she could only have two baths a week. But on the other nights she washed herself from the waist up at the kitchen sink. I knew the extent of her ablutions because, a few weeks before, I had squinted into the kitchen through the narrow aperture between the door and the upright.
I got up from the divan and wandered over to the door. But I did not peer through the aperture. It had been too disturbing last time. I had only seen her bare back, but that was enough to set the mechanism of desire lurching into motion. It was only a back; but a nice, shapely back. And I had never seen her back completely bare before. Even the narrow straps of a bathing-suit top made all the difference, I discovered. If I looked now I might see more. But I did not want to see more, unless I could touch more.
‘What are you doing, Jonathan?’ said Pauline, her voice slightly muffled by a towel. ‘Not peeping I hope?’
‘Just looking for a match.’
‘My lighter’s in your jewellery box.’
I had given her the green tooled
-leather jewellery case for her last birthday. Rummaging amongst the ceramic earrings and glass beads I found the little heart-shaped lighter. Then my eyes fell on an imprinted metal tab, at the bottom of the case, of the kind that you get from machines on railway stations. I took it out and read the inscription. It said: ‘M.B. LUVS P.V.’ A door in my mind I usually kept bolted suddenly gave way, and a wind of memories howled through me.
I was still holding the tab, mentally dazed and breathless, when Pauline came back into the bed-sitting room in her dressing-gown, brushing her hair. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she was saying. Then, as I did not reply, she stopped brushing and looked at me.
‘What on earth have you got there?’
I showed her, and she flushed slightly.
‘I didn’t know I still had it. Michael gave it to me as a joke once.’
‘I know, I was there.’
‘Were you? I don’t remember.’
‘I was watching from the train. And I didn’t think it was a joke.’
Pauline was silent, a little sulky. ‘Well it’s all over now, anyway.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘I wonder where he is now?’
‘Who, Michael? I expect he’s all right. He usually managed to fall on his feet.’
‘That’s just about the last thing you could say about him. He usually fell on his head.’
‘Well, don’t let’s make ourselves miserable thinking about him now, just before you’ve got to leave. Come and sit down on the divan.’
This was usually my suggestion, and ‘sit down’ was a euphemism for ‘lie down’. But I obeyed the summons sluggishly, and retained an upright posture. Pauline said:
‘Darling, I believe you’re jealous.’
‘Not jealous. The opposite really. What’s the word for feeling you don’t deserve to be better off than somebody else? I don’t think there is one.’
‘Why should you feel like that?’ asked Pauline, resuming her hair-brushing.
‘I mean I’ve got you, and he hasn’t, for one thing.’
‘But darling, we suit each other so much better. Michael and I were never really suited. I was very fond of him—he was my first regular boy-friend. But I never had a moment free from worry. And with us … it’s been so much fun. I mean, for instance, Michael never took me to a single serious play.’
‘And I’ve never taken you to a dance.’
‘Well I agree with you that going to the theatre is more worth while.’
Yes, I had indoctrinated Pauline very successfully. I had not only made her do what I wanted: I had persuaded her to like it. I was silent, and Pauline put down her hairbrush.
‘You know, you are jealous, whether you admit it or not. I suppose you think I’ve kept that bit of tin for a souvenir. Well I haven’t, and to prove it,’—she rose to her feet—‘I’ll throw it away.’
She looked round the room, with somewhat comic puzzlement, for some way of disposing of the tab in a sufficiently decisive fashion. The fire, which would have been the obvious place, was a gas-fire. Finally she dropped the tab into a waste-paper basket.
‘How do I know you won’t ferret it out when I’ve gone?’ I teased her.
‘All right.’ Her lips pursed in vexation, she retrieved the tab from the basket, opened the window above the divan, and flung the strip of metal into the garden.
‘You could still look for it tomorrow morning,’ I observed.
‘Well, I don’t intend to,’ she replied crossly.
I laughed, and pulled her down on to the divan. After a token struggle she first submitted, and then responded to my caresses.
She always seemed to get more out of it than I did. At the first touch of my hand, which I slipped under her dressing-gown and pyjama-top, on her stomach, she lapsed into a kind of sensual trance. I enjoyed it all right, and my flesh signalled its response in the usual way, but I never stopped thinking, as she seemed to. Perhaps when it came to the real thing I too would stop thinking. Meanwhile my chief pleasure was in a sense of power over her body. There was also a certain academic curiosity in seeing how far I could go.
This time I seemed to be climbing higher up her rib-cage than usual, until my fingers met the soft protuberance of her breast. I held my breath like a thief who has trodden on a creaking floorboard, and then my hand closed over her breast. It felt good, but almost at once I was a little sad. This established a precedent, and yet no subsequent contact would be as exquisite as this. Pauline moaned faintly, ‘Better not, darling,’ and I withdrew my hand. But I continued to kiss her, guiding her back to the ground.
We lay together and smoked in silence for a while. Pauline yawned and stretched happily.
‘Darling, it doesn’t seem possible that you’re going back to camp for the last time.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
For nearly two years, the same hundred miles between Badmore and London covered in each direction, every weekend. Well, nearly every week-end. I had only missed two: once before the General Inspection, and once when I was inevitably kept back with the Rear Party at last Easter’s Block Leave (having wangled my way out of every previous Rear Party). It annoyed me slightly that I had missed those two week-ends, but even so it must have been something of a record. It was fortunate of course that at Badmore week-end guard duties were done by visiting N.C.O.s who were on courses. Before I was made up I had paid impecunious troopers to do my weekend guards for me. Expensive, at fifteen shillings a time, but worth it.
‘It certainly doesn’t,’ I repeated. ‘I’m sure that next Sunday I’ll board the coach to Badmore out of sheer habit.’
‘No you won’t, darling,’ said Pauline gleefully, ‘because we’ll be in Majorca!’
‘So we shall! I’d forgotten that delightful fact for a moment. What time is it again?’
‘Six-fifteen in the morning at the terminus.’
‘It’s a good job they let us out a day early at Badmore.’
The following Thursday morning, the day after I was released from the Army, we were flying to Palma, on a cheap charter-flight, for a holiday. The prospect gave me great pleasure. To throw off my khaki and fly into the sun: it seemed a symbol and a celebration of my release from two years’ curtailment of liberty. It would also eliminate that treacherous feeling of faint regret and nostalgia with which we part from any familiar environment, however uncongenial it has been. I had already planned to send to the ‘A’ Squadron staff from Majorca some glossy, glamorous picture-postcard with a gloating, jubilant message on the back. Perhaps not after all. It would only be a gesture towards that arbitrary, illusory ‘comradeship’ people talked about so glibly. Better cut off all connections with the Army at once. Except perhaps—for memory is like a sieve that lets the unhappy bits through—to set aside an occasional few minutes for meditation on how boring and tedious and exasperating it all was. And at times really miserable. The first few weeks at Catterick particularly. Catterick. That brought back Mike.
‘What about that coffee?’ I said.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH Mike Brady began on a platform of Darlington station on a Thursday late in August in the mid-fifties. I have forgotten what day of August it was, but I know it was a Thursday because all new intakes of National Servicemen were required to report to their training regiments on Thursdays, at fortnightly intervals. All over England that morning trains had drawn out of stations, out of great termini, out of village halts, with their cargoes of callow youths in varying moods of confidence, apprehension and fear: public schoolboys wondering if they would get a commission in father’s old regiment (they needn’t have worried, father had written to the Colonel); grammar school boys making resolutions to keep studying in preparation for the university (they scarcely opened a book for the next two years); office boys and factory workers and young fellows of every kind wondering how they could keep their girls or pay the H.P. on their motorbikes or generally enjoy the prosperity the newspapers accused them of (they soo
n found they couldn’t).
I had come up to Darlington from King’s Cross with a pretty fair cross-section. There was the ex-public schoolboy (a minor public school I guessed) who took command of the situation, and of the conversation once it started. He had flat, blond hair and a handsome face, and I took an instant dislike to him. He had been, we swiftly learned, a sergeant in his school O.T.C., and he remarked that he had brought his brasses with him. The significance of this observation escaped me at the time, but I envied him later. After he had succeeded in undermining the morale of the two West Country lads who sat opposite him, grinning awkwardly and twisting their hands, he turned to me and addressed me through my newspaper.
‘Are you going to Catterick, too?’
He was a born officer; I was forced to lower my paper, and to reply.
‘Yes. Isn’t everybody on this train?’
‘Not necessarily,’ he said humourlessly. ‘Which unit?’
‘Eh?’
‘Which regiment are you going to?’
I fished in my pocket, under his disapproving gaze, for my draft notice. ‘Twenty-first Royal Tank Regiment,’ I read.
‘So am I. Did you apply for the R.A.C.?’
‘R.A.C.?’
‘The Royal Armoured Corps,’ he explained testily. ‘The R.T.R. is part of the R.A.C.’
‘All these initials make me dizzy. No, I applied for the Education Corps. I’m hoping that this is just preliminary training.’
‘Want a cushy time, eh? Well it’s not a bad idea if you don’t mind giving up the chance of a commission. You get made up to Sergeant automatically in the Education Corps. But I don’t think you’ll get in. Education Corps chaps usually do their Basic Training with the Infantry.’
I cursed his air of knowledgeability, the more heartily because I thought he might be right. What the hell would I do in the Armoured Corps for two years?
‘Got your G.C.E.?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just taken my B.A.,’ I said, hoping this would deflate him.