Ginger, You're Barmy

by David Lodge

  Finally Baker turned on Percy.

  ‘Higgins?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You don’t call me sir, you fool. My name’s Corporal Baker.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Corporal.’

  ‘Why in Christ’s name did they make you a P.O.?’

  ‘I don’t know, Corporal. The officer said he’d give me a chance.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen, Corporal.’

  ‘Eighteen, and you haven’t passed your School Certificate?’

  ‘I was rather backward in Latin and Greek, Corporal.’

  There was a general laugh. Baker closed the proceeding by saying, ‘Thank Christ we’ve got a Navy.’ We rose to our feet with a clatter of boots and capsized benches, and lined up outside the hut for our first drill instruction.

  That Fallowfield and Peterson were P.O.s was of course in the nature of things. Mike, Percy and myself had drifted into this category without premeditation. On the second day in Amiens Camp my already enfeebled hopes of eventually getting into the Education Corps had been crushed. Between being issued with boots and having my hair cut I had a brief, unprofitable interview with an irritable and overworked Personnel Officer. My immediate resentment of his manner was evidently reciprocated, for later I had the opportunity of reading the comments he made that day on my training record sheet: Educated up to university level: thinks too much of himself. What I read later only confirmed the impression I received during the interview itself. It was then that I first began to realize how uncongenial the Army was going to be.

  I dimly perceived that I had been wrenched out of a meritocracy, for success in which I was well qualified, and thrust into a small archaic world of privilege, for success in which I was singularly ill-endowed. I was brusquely told to forget about the Education Corps. Even if there were a vacancy in the latter I could not be transferred because the R.A.C. was senior in the line to the Education Corps, and a man could not be transferred from a corps of greater seniority to one of lesser. All my arguments broke on this granite wall of irrationality. Because I had been arbitrarily allocated, contrary to my wish, to the R.A.C., which aroused in me neither loyalty nor interest, I was to be barred, by a meaningless convention, from the one occupation in which I might have been of some use to the Army and to myself, and to be retained in a position which promised to be equally unprofitable to us both. I put this, as politely as I could, to the Personnel Officer. He flushed and made a visible effort to control himself.

  ‘Look…’ (he glanced at his papers to remind himself of my name) ‘Browne. You’ve only been in the Army for two days, so I’ll make allowances. I’ll just tell you that you could be put in the guard-house for what you’ve just said. Forget about the university. Forget about the Education Corps. You’re in the R.A.C. for two years, and you might as well make the best of it.

  ‘Let me make the situation quite clear to you. On Monday you begin your Basic Training, which lasts for five weeks. You will then receive trade-training, unless you are a Potential Officer. The four trades open to you are: Signaller/Gunner, Gunner/Driver, Driver, or Clerk. If you wish I can put you down as a Potential Officer, since your educational qualifications warrant it. In that case you will have a short P.O. Course here, at the end of which you will go before Uzbee, or Unit Selection Board. If you pass that you will go to Wozbee, or War Office Selection Board. If you pass that you will go to Cadet School, and if you are successful there you should receive a commission in about ten months’ time, though it is extremely doubtful whether you would get a commission in the R.A.C. Probably an infantry regiment, or the Service Corps.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but you just said that I couldn’t be transferred from the R.A.C.’

  He reddened and looked at me sharply. ‘The situation is different for officers. There aren’t enough places for all the cadets who would like commissions in the R.A.C. Now do I put you down as a P.O. or not?’

  Disheartened and demoralized, I pondered dully.

  ‘Come on, Browne, I haven’t all day.’

  I told him to put me down as a P.O.

  Mike was interviewed immediately after me. While the Personnel Officer was committing his unfavourable impressions of me to paper, we had a moment in which I told Mike the unsatisfactory result of my interview. Then his name was called, and I sat and sulked in the ante-room while I waited for him.

  It was depressing to find myself in a situation in which all the possibilities were equally unpalatable. I did not want to be an officer. I did not want to be a Signaller/Gunner. I did not want to be a soldier, period. However I thought in my innocence that a P.O. might have an easier time, and I had therefore elected to be one. Even then I felt a certain uneasiness at having entered for a competition I did not particularly want to win. But my main anxiety was that Mike should make a similar choice, and so bear me company. I was relieved to find my hopes fulfilled. His interview had gone more easily than mine, perhaps because he seemed utterly indifferent to what might happen to him. Or perhaps the Personnel Officer was disarmed by his failure to pass his Finals. At any rate the officer had at once suggested that he should try for a commission.

  It was immediately obvious from that first drill-instruction that Percy was in for a bad time. We did only simple marching and the halt, but Percy was always out of step, always colliding with the man in front of him on the halt. As, in the succeeding weeks, the drill became more complex, Percy’s blunders became more outrageous. At the turn or about-turn, he was sure to go stumbling off at a tangent to the rest of the squad. In arms drill he frequently dropped his rifle, and was a menace to himself and anyone within two yards radius. In his hand the weapon had more offensive possibilities than Lee-Enfield ever dreamed of.

  Actually I myself was surprised and somewhat vexed to find that drill was quite difficult, and that it extended my concentration and mental alertness to the full. Arms drill I found particularly irksome, for the rifle was heavy to my meagre muscles, and bruised my collar-bone painfully. Most of us felt the spiteful edge of Baker’s tongue at one time or another, but Percy rapidly established himself as Baker’s chief butt. Watching Percy inevitably bungling the simplest order and agonizing under Baker’s coarse sarcasm, was a painful experience, an army farce in bad taste. Of course there was plenty of laughter from the squad, which Baker made only a token effort to suppress. Sometimes he would stand the rest of us at ease and make Percy perform solo for the general diversion. Once he stopped a fellow instructor who was passing, and showed off Percy’s paces like a circus animal’s. The other N.C.O. grinned uncomfortably, and I suspected that he didn’t really approve. Perhaps the cruellest thing Baker inflicted on Percy was to punish the whole squad because of his ineptitude. Often we would be left pounding the vast, arid barrack square after the other squads had been dismissed, because Percy couldn’t master the about-turn on the march, while the precious minutes of Naafi-break or lunch-hour ticked away. Even I, a friend of Percy’s in a way, found myself cursing him under my breath at such times; while the resentment of the others, needless to say, was more vocal.

  But I was not really a friend of Percy’s. I found him pathetic, touching, but dull. However, since Mike’s heroic defence of Percy on the first evening, their relationship had followed an archetypal school-yarn pattern and a curious friendship had sprung up between them. I therefore saw more of Percy than I might otherwise have done.

  Gradually I filled in his background—partly by what he told me himself, but mainly from what Mike passed on to me, for Percy was far less reticent when he was alone with Mike. He came from down-at-heel gentlefolk in Lincolnshire, but his parents had died when he was young, and he had been brought up by an uncle and aunt. His family were ‘Old Catholics’ which, Mike explained to me, meant that they belonged to the small minority of English Catholics who had kept their Faith through the Penal days. I gathered that they were a tightly-knit, conservative, clannish group, who regarded Irish and convert Catholics with rather
more suspicion than they did Protestants. Percy’s guardian had sent him to a seminary school in Hampshire, a boarding school which was attached to a seminary. The education there had a decidedly ecclesiastical slant, and likely boys were groomed for the priesthood from an early age. This was thought to be an appropriate destiny for Percy, and one that his parents would have approved of. Percy, with his usual obligingness, had happily accepted the idea. When he failed to pass his ‘O’ level G.C.E. at the third attempt, however, his masters regretfully informed his guardian that there was no point in encouraging him to study for the priesthood any more. This slightly surprised me. The life of a priest seemed so unattractive and uncomfortable that I thought the ecclesiastical authorities would have hung on to anybody who was foolish enough to put himself into their hands.

  ‘Agnostic be damned!’ snorted Mike, when I expressed this opinion. ‘Maria Monk dies hard. I bet you think the Inquisition carries on in dark cellars under presbyteries in Basingstoke and Camden Town. Seriously, I agree with you that it’s surprising how difficult it is to become a priest when you consider the shortage of vocations. It’s good policy though. In Spain and Italy, where it’s much easier, you find the worst ecclesiastical scandals.’

  This conversation took place on the Saturday at the end of our first week of Basic Training. That morning we had received a lethal three-in-one injection against tetanus, typhoid and some other scourge whose name I forget, plus vaccination against smallpox. The effects were highly unpleasant, and we had been put on ‘light duties’ for the week-end. Some of the lads had violent fever, and lay shivering and sweating under blankets. I had a headache, but the main effect of the injections on me was an indescribable mental depression. Mike and I lay prone on our beds, too wretched and ill to move.

  ‘Was Percy disappointed when he was turned down?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. Except that he didn’t like his guardians to be disappointed. They sound rather grim. But the Army must be a nasty shock to him.’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ I replied with feeling.

  ‘Yes, but it’s different for us, Jon. In some ways Percy led a more Spartan life in the seminary school than this. He’s used to lousy food, sleeping in dormitories, getting up early for mass, the lack of freedom and so on. That doesn’t worry him as it worries us. What worries him is the way people shout and swear at him, no matter how hard he tries to please. Seminarians can be pretty bloody, but at least they keep up the appearances of decency. There’s a respect for peace and privacy. It’s bad enough leaving a seminary and going out into the world,—my brother did it. But to go straight out of the seminary into the Army—it must be like taking a wrong turning in Paradise and plunging down into the Pit.’

  I didn’t admit it to Mike, but his simile fitted my feelings as well. Paradise: London, the dull suburb where I lived; college, the cramped lecture-rooms in the converted warehouse block, the dingy, stale-smelling lounge. That was Paradise. And the Army,—yes, I thought, as I looked down the cheerless hut, at its iron beds on which the grey-faced youths writhed and groaned in the grip of their ague, yes, this was the Pit. I closed my eyes.

  One thing everyone acquires in the Army is a gluttonous appetite for sleep. To normal young people sleep is just an irritating demand of nature’s, confiscating hours of possible enjoyment and study. Sleep is the opium of the soldier, the cheap universal drug, the anaesthetic against boredom and homesickness. The experience of missing sleep,—on guard or on the journey back to camp after leave,—teaches him the value of sleep, makes him greedy for sleep, so that he begins to sleep even when he is not tired. When he hasn’t got a leave pass or money, the soldier will customarily spend Sunday in bed, even after a lazy and idle week. But during Basic Training we slept at every opportunity because we were exhausted after square-bashing all day and cleaning equipment half the night.

  The day began at 5.30. Groaning and cursing we wrenched ourselves from sleep’s narcotic embrace as the orderly corporal slammed in and out of the hut leaving his harsh summons lingering on the air. We reacted in different ways: some hopped straight out of bed; some twisted under the blankets, trying futilely to corkscrew their way back into oblivion; some sat up in bed, yawning, scratching, farting. Mike reached out automatically for the half-smoked cigarette he had extinguished the night before. I lay as I had woken, motionless, as if with practice I might be able to will the world into immobility for a few extra minutes. When Mike had finished his dog-end he swung his legs to the ground, and I followed suit as if our limbs were connected by invisible wires. The more wretched I felt, the less I liked to let him out of my sight. We pulled on our boots and denims, and shuffled out, speechless, to the wash-house, shivering slightly in the chill morning air. If we were lucky there was still hot water in the taps; if not, there was the rasping agony of a cold-water shave and the sting of styptic pencil on ghastly wounds along the jaw bone.

  Then, articulate at last, to breakfast: flaccid bacon and tinned tomatoes in a pool of red juice on a cold plate, like the leftovers of a nasty operation, served by surly, white-faced cooks who had already been up for two hours. Back to the huts. We emptied our bowels as quickly as possible: the lavatories never flushed, and each one could be used exactly once without offence. But often there was not time. There were the various jobs to be done in and around the hut: sweeping the floor, polishing the windows, and, if one were unlucky, ‘ablutions’. This last meant hurling buckets of water down the clogged pans so that the inspecting officer wouldn’t be reminded that the plumbing didn’t work. In the hut there was feverish activity as the time of first parade approached. We made up our beds, folding up the blankets to regulation measurements; laid out whatever pieces of equipment were required for inspection; struggled into our webbing and polished our boots.

  At five to eight Corporal Baker arrived on his bicycle, dismounting by numbers, to goad us out of the hut with his carefully chosen insults. He marched us off to the barrack square to parade with the rest of the Intake. Then commenced the solemn pantomime of inspection: standing to attention in the brisk air, bowels uncomfortably heavy if one had not had time to visit the lavatory, while the leathery-faced Sergeant Box moved slowly along the line, Baker a pace behind, his needle-sharp pencil poised to inscribe the sergeant’s inevitable condemnation of our turnout. Box pored over our brasses like an archaeologist examining some rare bronze medallion. ‘What’s all this shit?’ he would inquire, pointing at a minute smear on a buckle.

  It was the special delight of the N.C.O.s to ask questions which could only be answered to one’s disadvantage within the framework of military discipline. In the following illustration the words in italics represent possible truthful replies which had to be suppressed for obvious reasons.

  ‘What’s all this shit?’

  I don’t see any shit.

  ‘I don’t know, Sergeant.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you, it’s shit. See?’

  No.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘Did you clean your kit last night?’

  Of course I did as you very well know.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘Well you didn’t clean it properly, did you?’

  Yes.

  ‘No, Sergeant.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Firstly, I don’t accept that my equipment isn’t properly cleaned. Secondly, if it isn’t cleaned to your satisfaction, that’s because you are not to be satisfied. Thirdly, you know and I know that it’s a question of no importance. that you have to pick on something to establish your authority, and that we are going through an elaborate and meaningless ritual to create the illusion that I am being made a soldier of.

  ‘I don’t know, Sergeant.’

  ‘You don’t know! Well you’d better find out before tomorrow morning. Your trouble is that you’re idle. What are you?’

  A bloody sight more intelligent than you, for a start.

  ‘Idle, Sergeant.’

  Actually Mike developed
quite a successful technique for dealing with the ‘You’re-idle-what-are-you?’ formula. He would innocently reply: ‘What you said, Sergeant.’ Then the N.C.O. would ask with a smirk, sure of getting the admission he wanted: ‘And what was that?’

  ‘You said I was idle.’

  This would usually satisfy the bone-headed interrogator, but even he would be dimly aware that ‘you said I was idle’ was not the same thing as ‘[I’m] idle’. I regret that I never had the nerve to imitate Mike.

  The inspection was a farce of course, but it was depressing to find how quickly one came to treat it seriously, to observe the approach of Sergeant Box almost with anxiety. A least I did, and Percy could be seen visibly trembling. I’m sure Mike never treated the business with anything other than contempt.

  After the inspection there was a brief drill period followed by P.T.,—the most hateful hour of the day as far as I was concerned. We changed into singlets and shorts, and trotted to the gymnasium in boots, carrying our plimsolls. We made a grotesque spectacle, with our baggy shorts, knobbly knees, hairy legs, all terminating in clumsy black boots. But then the whole object of the exercise was to destroy one’s dignity. At the gym we were handed over to the tender mercies of the P.T. instructors, who were typical of their tribe: lounging bullies in soiled white sweaters, who kept up an appearance of muscular fitness and agility thinly disguising a profound laziness and perceptible homosexual proclivities. Everything was done relentlessly at the double. ‘Last one into the gym is on fatigues.’ And so there was always a stupid scramble to get off one’s boots, with one of the instructors playfully wielding a rubber slipper. ‘If he tries any of le vice anglais on me he’s looking for trouble,’ Mike muttered to me one day. But the instructors were wary with the older conscripts, and made up for it by being particularly vindictive in the gym. This was the usual hygienic torture chamber with wall bars for racking limbs, horses for rupturing abdomens, ropes for skinning hands, and bristly mats laughably supposed to soften one’s falls. Having been to a school equipped with a gym, I was able to acquit myself just well enough to avoid censure. Some of the other lads, however, were obviously experiencing it all for the first time. Percy was in pure misery.