Ginger, You're Barmy

by David Lodge

  ‘Oh! Where?’

  ‘London.’

  He nodded, reassured. ‘I’m going up to Oxford myself after the Army.’

  Yes, you would, I thought. P.P.E. and hockey Blue. I flipped my paper up to my face. He turned to the remaining member of our little group, a rather slovenly, oafish sort of person, who had got into our compartment at Grantham.

  ‘Are you going to Catterick?’

  ‘Me? Naw.’ He guffawed. ‘Naw. Ah’ve ’ad Catterick.’ He guffawed again. ‘Ah’ve ’ad the Army.’

  ‘You’ve done your National Service, have you?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye! T’day!’

  We all laughed, a trifle edgily. Even the public schoolboy was a little taken aback, displeased to find himself a tenderfoot after all. Actually it wasn’t such an ironical coincidence as we all imagined, for, as I afterwards discovered, intake day was also, officially, release day. One of us was taking the place vacated by this released soldier. I looked at him with curiosity. He didn’t look very soldierly. His hair was long and his clothes were cheaply flashy—that North of England flashiness that is always about two years behind the South. His pimply brows were creased in some kind of mental effort. Finally his forehead cleared, and he said with a grin:

  ‘Well, you’ve only got seven hundred and thirty days t’ push!’

  The train was slowing as it drew into Doncaster. He stood up and looked eagerly out of the window, took his bag from the rack and disappeared into the corridor.

  ‘His unit must have been a shower,’ said the public schoolboy, re-asserting himself.

  I refused to make any further contribution to the conversation. The jubilation of the released soldier had disturbed me slightly. I realized how little thought I had given to the Army. It had been merely an irritating idea which I had brushed aside in the intensive study for Finals, and the anxiety of waiting for results. I realized that I knew nothing about the thing that I was to be for the next two years. I was glad when we reached Darlington, where I was able to shake off the public schoolboy. I was quite delighted when I saw Mike fiddling with an automatic machine on the platform.

  ‘Mike!’ I cried, ‘Fancy seeing you here!’

  ‘Hallo, Jon,’ he replied, more calmly. ‘Don’t tell me what you’re doing here. I can guess.’

  ‘Catterick?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Which unit?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Which regiment?’

  ‘Oh … Twenty-first something or other.’

  ‘So am I.’ I was delighted. ‘Come and have something to eat. We’ve got half an hour.’

  He turned back to the automatic machine, and gave it a kick. ‘This thing’s got my last sixpence and it won’t even give me a bar of chocolate.’

  ‘Oh, have something on me.’

  We went into the buffet, and I bought a couple of glossy pork pies and two cups of tea.

  ‘Well, this is a coincidence,’ I said. As with the released soldier, however, I was wrong. It wasn’t really a coincidence. The number of forms you filled in might have led you to believe that some thought and discrimination went into the allocation of National Servicemen to particular branches of the Services. In fact it became quite clear that nobody paid the slightest attention to the forms, bundles of which were pushed into whatever pigeonhole happened to be empty. Mike and I had both come down from the same college of the same university at the same time, and it was not really surprising that we were destined for the same training regiment. However we were both pleased to find a friend amid the alien crowd of bewildered and unhappy youths shambling about Darlington station.

  Our greeting was warmer under these circumstances than it might otherwise have been. For though Mike and I had both studied the same subject, English, and had both been in the same year, we had had very little contact with each other at college. Neither of us had been very typical undergraduates. I had lived at home, and devoted myself almost exclusively to study. But even had I participated more fully in ‘Union activities’ I doubt whether I would have been any more intimate with Mike, who had taken as little interest in the extra-curricular activities of the college as he had taken in the curriculum itself. I knew him mainly as a curiously aimless individual who could be seen at most hours of the day in the Union Bar, drinking beer and playing darts with a group of cronies who seemed hell-bent on occupying their time at the university as unprofitably as possible. He contributed some violent and obscure poems to the college literary magazine from time to time, and on one occasion had delivered in a debate what was said to be a striking speech against birth control. (‘Mr Brady said that the people who advocated birth control always waited until they were born before doing so,’ the college newspaper had reported.) That was the sum total of Mike’s contribution to university life, as far as I knew.

  I looked across the marble-topped table at Mike, and speculated, with some amusement, as to what the Army would make of him. In his soiled and neglected clothing he had always stood out from the calculated and self-conscious bohemianism of college like an authentic cowboy on a dude ranch. He wore now a dirty sports shirt open to the lower chest for want of buttons, and revealing the absence of a vest; an old brown sports jacket frayed at the cuffs and button-holes; a pair of shapeless, stained corduroy trousers; and black shoes that had never been polished since he walked out of the shop in them, leaving their disintegrating predecessors, no doubt, in the hands of a scandalized salesman. His vivid ginger hair was longer than I had ever seen it, hanging shaggily down over his white, freckled forehead and neck.

  ‘Hanging on to your hair till the last minute?’ I joked.

  ‘Is it very long?’ he asked innocently. ‘I meant to have it cut, but I couldn’t afford it.’

  A topic of some embarrassment hung between us, and I was relieved when he acknowledged it.

  ‘Congratulations on your First.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘It was bad luck for you.’ Mike had failed. I didn’t really mean what I said. Mike hadn’t been unlucky. He hadn’t done a stroke of work, and the only surprise was that the Department had let him carry on at college after his first year.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘It was a nuisance. My mother got rather worked up.’ He shook his head like a horse in summer, as if to rid himself of unpleasant memories. I was sorry for purely selfish reasons that Mike had failed. My First was still recent enough to give me a pleasant glow whenever I thought of it, and I would have welcomed the chance to gossip about the papers and other people’s results. But this would have been tactless in the circumstances.

  ‘Couldn’t you have stayed on to do research?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going back afterwards. I wanted to get this thing over first.’

  ‘I’d have kept out of it, if I were you; they might abolish it soon.’

  ‘Yes, that would be rather sickening. But I didn’t want to start studying again so soon. I think it might do me good to have a break.’

  God knows where I had got this idea from, that the Army might ‘do me good’, that two years of tedious serfdom would be ‘a break’. I suppose I had concocted it as some kind of reassurance.

  ‘Our train goes in a few minutes,’ I said, glancing at the clock above us. ‘We’d better move.’

  Darlington was never for me anything more than a railway station, a junction on the route to London, a frontier post. One could almost trace the line of the frontier through the station. Where the London expresses pulled in the platforms were wide and spacious, with buffets, bookstalls, prosperous-looking travellers and smart girls. Mike and I now left this sector and crossed over to the smaller, bleaker, dirtier part which was the terminus for the branch line to Richmond. We got into a compartment of a train full of conscripts. The air was thick with Woodbine smoke and confused accents from every quarter of the British Isles. There was a constant restless activity in and about the train: doors were opened and slammed shut, faces were thrust in at the window, and abruptly withdrawn. People changed
seats and sometimes compartments, charged past at a gallop, and rushed back again, leaned out of the windows, shouted gutturally to each other. There was a strange nervous hilarity in the air, as if a Clacton Excursion had got mixed up with the Siberian Special, and no one quite knew whether they would end up at Butlin’s or a concentration camp.

  Our first weeks in the Army were to lean towards the latter. We had an indication of this as soon as our train, after wheezing and creaking through the soggy Yorkshire countryside for three-quarters of an hour, reached Richmond. In the station yard were several lorries drawn up to take us to our various units, each lorry with an N.C.O., and each N.C.O. with a mill-board.

  ‘Twenty-first R.T.R. over here,’ called out a tall, tense corporal with a thin, fair moustache. Mike and I clambered into the back of the awkwardly high vehicle. Finding the interior dark and dank, we stayed near the tailboard. Other conscripts scrambled in. One lit a cigarette.

  ‘Put that cigarette out!’ rapped the corporal sternly. There was a nervous tittering from the rest of the passengers as the offender hurriedly dropped his cigarette on to the floor, and stamped on it.

  ‘And we don’t want your dog-ends in the truck,’ continued the corporal. The dog-end was duly picked up and ejected from the truck. The episode seemed such a naïve act of military assertiveness that Mike and I instinctively looked at each other and grinned.

  ‘What are you two grinning at?’ the corporal barked at us. ‘The first thing you nigs can learn is that you don’t smoke in army vehicles.’

  We learned more than that from this brief episode: a new word, ‘nig’, meaning new conscript, an item in the weird philological tangle of army slang; and the realization that for the first time since childhood we were to be subjected to abuse and criticism without any appeal to the written and unwritten laws which control conduct in civilized life.

  ‘Well, you’re in the Army now,’ I said to Mike, as the corporal called ‘Roll it’, and the truck jerked into motion.

  ‘A rather unpleasant individual,’ he remarked. ‘I hope they’re not all like that.’

  Richmond is a lovely town blighted by the Army. Through it, in it and round it, Catterick Camp has spread like a pox, defacing the antique beauty of the town and the fine contours of the Yorkshire hills with its squalid architectural improvisation. The size of the camp is appalling. Our truck ground and whined through a seemingly endless expanse of squat huts huddled together round bleak parade grounds, forbidding barrack blocks, dejected rows of married quarters, and everywhere obtrusive military notice boards, with their strident colours and barbaric language of abbreviations.

  Amiens Camp (the name was pronounced phonetically), the home of the Twenty-first Royal Tank Regiment, lay on the outskirts of Catterick. In one sense this was a disadvantage since one was at some distance from such amenities as Richmond offered, and in particular from the railway station. On the other hand, one looked from the slopes of Amiens Camp on to a noble landscape as yet unspoiled by the Army. There was something peculiarly oppressive about the older, inner part of the camp, where a military slum had grown up with the haphazard ugliness of an industrial town in the nineteenth century. Not that Amiens Camp was by any means new. Most of the huts had been condemned in 1939. But it suggested rural rather than urban decay: grass grew thick and rank around derelict huts, and a few sheep were allowed to graze on various parts of the camp to keep the vegetation under control.

  We jumped down from the truck and were fed into the machine that dealt with new intakes. Clerks behind trestle tables took down details we had already given on various forms to various officials before being called up: name, address, occupation, education, sports, religion.

  ‘Catholic,’ said Mike, who was just beside me.

  ‘R.C.,’ muttered the clerk, penning the letters laboriously. ‘Hobbies or special interests?’

  ‘Red Indians,’ replied Mike. The clerk looked up, startled.

  ‘Now don’t be funny…’ he began.

  ‘I’m perfectly serious. I’m very interested in Red Indians. My great-grandmother was raped by one. She was a pioneer in the Wild West. I may have Red Indian——’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  I was so absorbed by this exchange that I missed the question my own clerk was asking me.

  ‘Religion?’ he repeated.

  ‘Eh? Oh, Agnostic.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t subscribe to any religion.’

  ‘Atheist,’ he said.

  ‘No, Agnostic. They’re quite different.’

  ‘You’ve got to be C. of E., R.C, O.D. or Atheist.’

  ‘What’s O.D.?’ I asked, interested.

  ‘Other denominations.’

  ‘Put down Agnostic. I’ll explain if necessary.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘How d’you spell it?’

  Next we had a medical examination. We sat round the walls of a warm, stuffy room which smelled of perspiration, wearing only jackets and trousers, waiting to be called in to the Medical Officer. Three soldiers in denims were making some adjustments to the lights. We sat, quiet and depressed, hoping perhaps that the medical might result in a last-minute reprieve, while the three soldiers conducted at the tops of their voices, as if oblivious of our presence, the most obscene conversation I had ever heard in my life. It might almost have been laid on by the authorities as an introduction course in Army language. It was obscene not only in its liberal and often ingenious use of the standard expletive that lingers like a persistent echo throughout any conversation in the Army, but also in its use of words whose obscenity, at that stage, I could only guess at, and in its content: sexual encounters experienced at the last weekend, or anticipated at the next, the merits and demerits (‘too messy’) of virgins as sexual prey, the dangers of intercourse with menstruating women (‘my mate said ’is bollocks turned blue’) et cetera.

  I listened with a kind of furtive fascination, furtive because I thought Mike might disapprove. But he seemed lost in thought.

  ‘Very select company,’ I said at last.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, them. Yes they are rather tiresome. But you’ll get used to it.’

  Meditating on this remark, I realized that Mike had had far more acquaintance with this kind of thing than I. At school and at college I had lived a protected life. Unlike most students I had never worked during my vacations, but had prudently conserved my grant to be able to study. Mike, on the other hand, had taken all kinds of temporary jobs, in factories, on building sites, often, unknown to the college authorities, during term. He had, therefore, already a broad experimental knowledge of the manners and conversation of the vast, uncouth British proletariat which were to me, in my first weeks in the Army, a revelation.

  One of the things I shall always associate with Basic Training is the exertion and indignity of carrying large, heavy objects. We always seemed to be moving our belongings at Catterick from one part of the camp to another. It started on that first afternoon when, after the cursory medical, we were issued with knife, fork, spoon, mug and bedding. A mattress, I found, was a peculiarly awkward thing to carry, since it was impossible to get one’s arms round it in any way. Eventually, after dropping the mattress once, and smashing my mug in the process, I stumbled into a hut and flung my burden down on a vacant bed. I quickly tossed my blankets on to the next bed to keep it for Mike.

  I sat on the bed and inspected the inhospitable interior of the hut. The floor was of uncovered stone flags. Several panes were missing from the windows. There was a low, battered tin locker beside each bed. Two deal tables and a few chairs made up the rest of the furniture. In the middle of the hut, at some distance from my bed, was a small, ineffective-looking stove. I was glad it was still August.

  The hut was already partly occupied by new Regular recruits. It was the practice to train these with the National Servicemen, but to receive them a few days earlier. If this was intended to give the Regulars a certain superiority of status, it was part
ially successful. For in Basic Training one lost one’s sense of proportion, as regards time. A fortnight later I looked upon a newly arrived intake, long-haired and civilian-clothed, with the jaundiced relish of an old lag seeing the prison gates open to admit some bewildered new detainee. So it was that we felt somewhat ill at ease before these Regulars of three days’ seniority, who lay on their beds with an air of composure and familiarity, directing rhetorical questions at us and exchanging jokes with each other in coarse, harsh voices.

  But their supremacy was not to last long. When training started in earnest we were all on equal terms, and soon the National Servicemen had the upper hand. The Army blundered, in fact, in training Regulars with National Servicemen. In any argument or exchange of abuse every National Serviceman could rely on the unanswerable riposte of ‘Well, at least I haven’t got three [or six, or twenty-two] years to push.’ Ironically the Regular soldiers, who had voluntarily enlisted, were quickly infected by the National Serviceman’s habit of ‘counting the days’.

  When Mike came in and deposited his bedding, we followed a bunch of Regulars to the cookhouse, a dark, high-roofed cavern, echoing with the clash of cutlery and the noisy mastication of sausages, mashed potatoes and gravy. It was a meal I found peculiarly repulsive at that hour, particularly the gravy, which I was too slow to intercept as it was splashed on to my plate. Mike ate his food mechanically, without discernible pleasure or distaste.

  ‘Did you put down for the R.A.C.?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. I didn’t put down for anything.’

  ‘I put down for the Education Corps. I said that it was the only Corps in which I thought I could be of any use. Do you think they sent me here out of spite?’

  ‘I doubt if they have the intelligence,’ replied Mike. ‘I doubt if they see anything inappropriate about putting you in the Armoured Corps. I expect they think they’re honouring you.’

  ‘I hope to hell I can get transferred,’ I said, looking round at the dismal scene.

  An officer in a black dress uniform, with highly polished belt and buckles, moved among the weary conscripts as they sat shovelling sausages and mash down their gullets. A sergeant with a black sash paced watchfully at his heels, as if he were conducting the officer through some zoo of cowed but potentially dangerous animals.