I suppose if I hadn’t put this shaving lotion on I wouldn’t have remembered it again. I don’t even know why I used that lotion today: perhaps it was because it was a beautiful summer morning and I felt rather lighthearted and gay. I don’t use lotions much though I do make use of Vaseline hair tonic as I’m getting a bit bald. I blame that on the caps we had to wear all the time during those two years of National Service in the army. Navy-blue berets they were. And that’s what the shaving lotion brought back.
Now I come to think of them, those years were full of things like boots, belts and uniforms. We had two sets of boots – second best boots and (if that makes any sense) first best boots. (Strictly speaking, it seems to be wrong to use the word ‘best’ about two objects, but this is the first time I’ve located the error.) Then again we had best battle dress and second best battle dress. (Again, there were only two lots.)
We always had to be cleaning our boots. The idea was to burn your boots so that you could get a proper shine, the kind that would glitter back at you brighter than a mirror, that would remove the grain completely from the toes. Many a night I’ve spent with hot liquefied boot polish, burning and rubbing till the dazzling shine finally appeared, till the smoothness conquered the rough grain.
We really had to be very clean in those days. Our faces too. In those days one had to be clean-shaven, absolutely cleanshaven, and, to get the tart freshness into my cheeks, I used shaving lotion, which is what brought it all back. The rest seems entirely without scent, without taste, all except the lotion.
I went to the army straight from university and I can still remember the hot crowded train on which I travelled all through the night and into the noon of the following day. Many of the boys played cards as we hammered our way through the English stations.
I am trying to remember what I felt when I boarded that train and saw my sister and mother waving their handkerchiefs at the station. To tell the truth, I don’t think I felt anything. I didn’t think of it as an adventure, still less as a patriotic duty. I felt, I think, numbed; my main idea was that I must get it over with as cleanly and as quickly as I could, survive without error.
About noon, we got off the train and walked up the road to the camp. It was beautiful pastoral countryside with hot flowers growing by the side of the road; I think they were foxgloves. In the distance I could see a man in a red tractor ploughing. I thought to myself: This is the last time I shall see civilian life for a long time.
After we had been walking for some time, still wearing our bedraggled suits (in which we had slept the previous night) and carrying our cases, we arrived at the big gate which was the entrance to the camp. There was a young soldier standing there – no older than ourselves – and he was standing at ease with a rifle held in front of him, its butt resting on the ground. His hair was close cropped under the navy-blue cap with the yellow badge, and when we smiled at him, he stared right through us. Absolutely right through us, as if he hadn’t seen us at all.
We checked in at the guardroom and were sent up to the barracks with our cases. As we were walking along – very nervous, at least I was – we passed the square where this terrible voice was shouting at recruits. There were about twenty of them and they looked very minute in the centre of that huge square, all grey and stony.
In any case – I can’t remember very clearly what the preliminaries were – we ended up in this barrack room and sat down on the beds which had green coverings and one or two blankets below. There must have been twelve of these beds – about six down each side – and a fire-place in the middle of the room with a flue.
Now, I didn’t know anything about the army though some of the others did. One or two of them had been in the Cadets (I remember one small, plump-cheeked, innocent-looking youngster of eighteen who had been in the cadet corps in some English public school: he looked like an angel, and he was reading an author called Firbank) but the rest of us didn’t know what to expect. Of course, I’d seen films about the army (though not many since I was a conscientious student, not patronising the cinema much) and thought that they were exaggerated. In any case, as far as my memory went, these films made the army out to be an amusing experience with a lot of hard work involved, and though sergeants and corporals appeared terrifying, they really had hearts of gold just the same. There used to be a glint in the sergeant’s eye as he mouthed obscenities at some recruit, and he would always praise his platoon to a fellow sergeant over a pint in the mess that same night. That was the impression I got from the films.
Well, it’s a funny thing: when we went into the army it was at first like a film (it became a bit more real later on). We were sitting on our beds when this corporal came in (at least we were told by himself that he was a corporal: I was told off on my second day for calling a sergeant major ‘sir’ though I was only being respectful). The first we knew of this corporal was a hard click of boots along the floor and then this voice shouting, ‘Get on your feet’. I can tell you we got up pretty quickly and stood trembling by our beds.
He was a small man, this corporal, with a moustache, and he looked very fit and very tense. You could almost feel that his moustache was actually growing and alive. He was wearing shiny black boots, a shiny belt buckle, a yellow belt and a navy-blue cap with a shining badge in it. And when we were all standing at a semblance of attention, he started pacing up and down in front of us, sometimes stopping in front of one man and then in front of another, and coming up and speaking to them with his face right up against theirs. And he said (as they do on the films),
‘Now, you men are going to think I’m a bastard. You’re going to want to go home to mother. You’re going to work like slaves and you’re going to curse the day you were born. You’re going to hate me every day and every night, if you have enough strength left to dream. But there’s one thing I’m going to say to you and it’s this: if you play fair by me I’ll play fair by you. Is that understood?’
There was a long silence during which I could hear a fly buzzing over at the window which was open at the top, and through which I could see the parade ground.
Then he said,
‘Get out there. We’re going to get you kitted out at the quartermaster’s.’
And that was it. I felt as if I had been hit by a bomb. I had never met anyone like that in my life before. And it was worse when one had come from a university. Not even the worst teacher I had met had that man’s controlled ferocity and energy. You felt that he hated you for existing, that you looked untidy, and that he was there to make you neater than was possible.
All this came back to me very quickly as a result of a whiff of that shaving lotion and, as I said, even during my time in the court I kept thinking about that period fifteen years before so that the sheriff had to speak to me once or twice.
The case itself was a very bad one, not the kind we usually get in this town which is small and nice, the kind of town where everyone knows everybody else and the roads are lined with trees. The background to the case was this:
Two youths were walking along the street late at night when they saw this down-and-out sitting on a bench. He had a bottle of VP and he was drinking from it. The two youths went over and asked him for a swig, but he wouldn’t give them any so, according to the police, they attacked him and, when he was down, they kicked him in the face and nearly killed him. In fact, he is in hospital at this moment and close to death. The youths, of course, deny all this and say that they never saw him before in their lives, and that they don’t know what the police are on about.
They are a very unprepossessing pair, I must confess, barely literate, long-haired, arrogant and contemptuous. They wear leather jackets, and one has a motor bike. They have a history of violence at dance halls, and one of them has used a knife. I don’t like them. I don’t like them because I don’t understand them. We ourselves are childless (Sheila compensates for that by painting a lot), but that isn’t the reason why I dislike them. They don’t care for me either and call me ‘da
ddy’. They are more than capable of doing what the police say they did, and there is in fact a witness, a young girl who was coming home from a dance. She says that she heard one of the youths say,
‘I wish the b—— would stop making that noise.’ They are the type of youths who have never done well in school, who haven’t enough money to get girls for themselves since they are always unemployed, and they take their resentment out on others. I would say they are irreclaimable, and probably in Russia they would be put up against a wall and shot. However, they have to have someone to defend them. One of them had the cheek to say to me,
‘You’d better get us off, daddy.’
They made a bad impression in the court. One of them says,
‘What would we need that VP crap for, anyway?’ It’s this language that alienates people from them, but they’re too stupid or too arrogant to see that. As well as this they accuse the police of beating them up with truncheons when they were taken in. But this is a common ploy.
Anyway, I kept thinking of the army all the time I was in court, and once I even said ‘sergeant’ to the judge. It was a totally inexplicable error. It’s lucky for me that he’s slightly deaf.
I was thinking of Lecky all the time.
Now, I suppose every platoon in the army has to have the odd one out, the one who can never keep in step, the one who never cleans his rifle properly, the one whose trousers are never properly pressed. And our platoon like all others had one. His name was Lecky. (The platoon in the adjacent hut had one too, though I can’t remember his name. He, unlike Lecky, was a scholarly type with round glasses and he was the son of a bishop. I remember he had this big history book by H. A. L. Fisher and he was always reading it, even in the Naafi, while we were buying our cakes of blanco, and buns and tea. I wonder if he ever finished it.)
Funny thing, I can’t remember Lecky’s features very well. I was trying to do so all day, but unsuccessfully. I think he was small and black-haired and thin-featured. I’m not even sure what he did in Civvy Street, but I believe I once heard it mentioned that he was a plumber’s mate.
The crowd in our platoon were a mixed lot. There were two English ex-schoolboys and a number of Scots, at least two of them from Glasgow. There was also a boxer, who spoke with a regional, agricultural accent. One of the public schoolboys had a record player which he had brought with him. He was a jazz devotee and I can still remember him plugging it into the light and playing, on an autumn evening, a tune called ‘Love, O, Love, O, Careless Love’. The second line, I think, was, ‘You fly to my head like wine’. The public schoolboys were very composed people (certain officers), and the chubby-cheeked one was always reading poetry.
Lecky stood out from the first day. First of all, he couldn’t keep in step. We used to march along swinging our arms practically up to our foreheads and then this voice from miles away would shout across the square, ‘Squad, Halt!’ Then the little corporal would march briskly across the square, and he’d come to a halt in front of Lecky and he’d say (the square was scorching with the heat in the middle of a blazing July), his face thrust up close to him, ‘What are you, Lecky?’ And Lecky would say, ‘I don’t know, Corporal.’ And the corporal would say, ‘You’re a bastard, aren’t you, Lecky?’ And Lecky would say, ‘I’m a bastard, Corporal.’ Then the marching would start all over again, and Lecky would still be out of step.
It is strange about these corporals, how they want everything to be so tidy, as if they couldn’t stand sloppiness, as if untidiness is a personal insult to them. I suppose really that the whole business becomes so mindlessly boring after a few years of it that the only release for them is the manic anger they generate.
Of course, Lecky got jankers. What this involved was that after training was over for the day (usually at about four o’clock) he would put on his best boots, best battle dress, best tie, best everything and report to the guardroom at the double. Then, after he had been inspected (if he didn’t get more jankers for sloppiness) he would double up to the barrack room again, change into denims, and go off to his assigned fatigue which might involve weeding or peeling potatoes or helping to get rid of swill at the cookhouse.
Continual jankers are a dreadful strain. You have to have all your clothes pressed for inspection at the guardroom; as well as that, boots and badges must be polished and belts must be blancoed. You live in a continual daze of spit and polish and ironing, and the only time you can find to do all this is after you have come back from your assigned task which is often designed to make you as dirty as possible. There is rapid change of clothes from battle dress to denims and back again. For after your fatigues are over you have to change back into battledress to be inspected at the guardroom for a second time. I must say that I used to feel sorry for him.
His bed was beside mine. I never actually spoke to him much. For one thing his only form of reading was comics, and we had very little in common. For another thing – though this is difficult to explain – I didn’t want to be infected by his bad luck. And after all what could I have done for him even if I had been able to communicate with him?
The funny thing was that as far as the rest of us were concerned the corporal became more relaxed as the training progressed and treated us as human beings. He would bellow at us out on the square, but at nights he would often talk to us. He’d even listen to the jazz records though he preferred pop. All this time while the others were gathered round the record player, the corporal in the middle, Lecky would be rushing about blancoing or polishing or making his bed tidy. Sometimes the corporal would shout at him, ‘Get a move on, Lecky, are you a f—— snail or something?’ And Lecky would give him a startled glance, before he would continue with whatever he was doing.
I never saw him write a letter. I have a feeling he couldn’t write very well. In fact, when he was reading the comics, you could see his lips move and his finger travel along the page. Once I even saw the corporal pick up one of the comics and sit on the bed quite immersed in it for a while.
At the beginning, Lecky seemed quite bright. He even managed to make a joke out of that classic day when he was first taught to fire the bren. Instead of setting it to single rounds, he released the whole batch of bullets in one burst and nearly ripped the target to shreds. I saw the corporal bending down very gently beside him and saying to him equally slowly, ‘What a stupid uneducated b—— you are, Lecky.’ He got jankers for that too.
But, as the weeks passed, a fixed look of despair pervaded his face. He acted as if his every movement was bound to be a mistake, as if he had no right to exist, and that carefree open-faced appearance of his faded to leave a miserable white mask. Sometimes you wonder if it was right.
The more I see of these two people in the court, the more I’m sure that they really are guilty of hitting that old man, though they themselves swear blind they didn’t do it. They keep insisting that they are being victimised by the police and that they were beaten up at the station. They even picked on one of the policemen as the one who did it. He very gravely refuted the charges. One of them says he never drank VP in his life, that he thinks it’s a drink only tramps use, and that he himself has only drunk whisky or beer. He is quite indignant about it: one could almost believe him. They also accuse the girl of framing them because one of them had a fight with her brother once on a bus. But their attitude is very defiant and it isn’t doing them any good. My wife was away yesterday seeing her mother so I had to go to Armstrong’s for lunch. Armstrong’s is opposite the court which is in turn just beside the police station. As I was entering the restaurant I was passed by the superintendent who greeted me very coldly, I thought. He is a tall broad individual, very proud of his rank, and you can see him standing at street corners looking very official and stern, with his white gloves in his hands, staring across the traffic, one of his minions, usually a sergeant, standing beside him. I wondered why he was so distant, especially as we often play bowls together and have been known to play a game of golf.
It str
uck me afterwards that perhaps he thought I had put them up to their accusations against the police. After all, we mustn’t undermine the authority of the police as they have a lot to put up with, and, even if they do use truncheons now and again, we must remember the kind of people they are dealing with. I believe in the use of psychology to a certain extent, but the victim must be protected too.
There was the time, too, when Lecky nearly killed off the platoon with a grenade. After a while it got so that hardly anyone in the hut spoke to him much. At the beginning they used to play tricks on him, like messing up his blankets, but that was before the corporal got to work on him (no, that’s not strictly true, the Glasgow boys were doing it even after that). Most of the time we didn’t see him at all, as he was so often on jankers. I don’t know why we didn’t speak to him. I think it was something about him that made us uneasy: I can only express it by saying that we felt him to be a born victim. It was as if he attracted trouble and we didn’t want to be in the neighbourhood when it struck. We didn’t want to have to do that spell of ten weeks’ training all over again as Lecky was sure to do.
One morning we had an inspection. We had inspections every Saturday: the CO (distant, precise, immaculately uniformed) would come along, busily accompanied by the sergeant major, the sergeant, and corporal of the platoon. Oh, and the lieutenant as well (our lieutenant had been to Cambridge). We would all be standing by our beds, of course, rifles ready so that the CO could peer down the barrel, followed in pecking order by all the members of his entourage. If there was a single spot of grease we were for it. Our beds had all our possessions laid out on them, blanco, fork, knife and spoon, vest, pants, and much that I can’t now remember. All, naturally, had to be spotlessly clean.
So there we were, standing stiff and frightened as the CO stalked up the room followed by the rest of his minions, the corporal with a small notebook in his hand. Unwavering and taut, we stared straight ahead of us, through the narrow window that gave out on the outside world which appeared to be composed of stone, as the only thing we could see was the parade ground.
The Red Door Page 7