by MARY HOCKING
‘Not even in the blitz!’ Ben registered astonishment.
‘I come from Herefordshire. How many dead men have you seen?’
Ben was surprised to realize, on reflection, that he had not seen a single dead body; he had simply constructed one from his glimpses of rubble and the bent figures of stretcher bearers.
‘Don’t worry!’ Geoffrey grinned at the consternation in Ben’s voice when he made this admission. ‘It will come soon enough.’ He fingered his drawings and said, without looking up, ‘Well, what about it, then? Will you add a few lines? Whatever you feel – your impressions in words of what we see.’ There was shyness in his manner now.
Ben, too, experienced that awkwardness which can be felt at the beginning of a friendship. He said, ‘But nothing much happens each day.’
‘Even monotony has different stages.’
Ben studied the drawings. As he looked at the figures at the start of the voyage, he saw that naked anxiety rubbed shoulders with brash exuberance, while resentment and pride jostled with an eager desire to please and a frantic wish to get the hell out of it. Gradually, as one day succeeded another, wariness crept into the faces, so that, although each kept its individual identity, one began to notice a certain family resemblance.
‘It will help to pass the time,’ he said. ‘But it will have to be what I feel, even if that doesn’t always match the drawing.’
‘Fair enough.’
It was not easy. The drawings, although unelaborated, were so exact that they demanded something which matched their authenticity. It surprised Ben that, with his training, he should have to work so hard to find a few apt words. Geoffrey noticed the anger which invested everything Ben wrote. There had been little cause for anger in his quiet, orderly home, and, for the first time in his life, he felt that, although his parents’ means were modest, he had had a privileged upbringing. He did not envy Ben his anger, but accepted it as a corrective to his own amiability.
They reached Halifax congratulating themselves that they still had not seen a dead man. In spite of several alarms, there had been no submarine attack. At Halifax, they were transferred to another ship. It was here that the brigade parted company from its transport; but the men were not to discover this for some time, and were thankful to have survived the first stage of what they still imagined to be their journey to Egypt.
Once more, they headed into the Atlantic. This time, sea-sickness was the worst discomfort they were to experience. They had rounded the Cape before rumours began to spread that they were not bound for Egypt, but Malaya. A certain mild hilarity greeted this. At the ship’s concert, a man with a good baritone voice sang ‘The Road to Mandalay’. There was a sketch entitled ‘From Southampton to Singapore by way of the Seven Seas and Five Continents’, which gave an opportunity for much bawdy humour involving harems, and bazaars, grass skirts and hula-hula costumes. Records of Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour were played; and Ben and Geoffrey contributed a number entitled, ‘The Navy will get you there, provided the Army tells them where’.
As the ship steamed on, more rumours circulated. The United States fleet had been sunk at Pearl Harbour. It seemed inconceivable, even allowing for the fact that the Yanks did not rate very high as seafarers, that they should allow their ships to be sunk by the Japs, who were known to be so short-sighted they could not tell a battleship from a whale.
Eventually, they arrived at Mombasa, where they spent Christmas. On Christmas Day, Hong Kong surrendered. After Christmas, they sailed to Singapore, where they disembarked without guns and to discover that they had no transport. They were issued with tropical kit and little else which would be of use to them. Two days after disembarking, they were sent to the Malayan mainland to reinforce troops supposedly engaged in holding the Japanese advance north of Johore. As they marched north towards Ayer Hitam, it was apparent that the Japanese advance had been more rapid than had been expected. Soon, they found themselves part of a retreating army.
They had little idea where they were going or what they were supposed to be doing. But during their long voyage, they had become soldiers, to the extent that they assumed someone else to be responsible for their fate. The realization that, on this occasion, no one had the slightest idea what was happening had not yet dawned on them. They had come to this so unprepared that the distant hills and surrounding jungle seemed a garishly inappropriate backcloth for a camp show, which might at any moment be rolled away and replaced by something more seemly. In fact, it was the rain which blotted it out. They slipped and slid and fell. When he was vertical, Ben walked with head and shoulders thrust forward, as though in haste to get a head start on competitors. Geoffrey thought that if they threw this man to the lions, he would strive to be first in the arena. ‘A proper countryman’s mile this is going to be!’ he warned Ben, and paced himself accordingly. Tandy trod carefully, working out ways of survival with each step he took. ‘You’ve got to keep up, boyo, because these buggers aren’t going to carry you unless you’ve done yourself a real mischief. And in this place you might die of that. But a damaged arm wouldn’t come amiss – no question of your carrying anyone then!’ Whatever their private thoughts, their faces wore a look of stoic indifference.
It rained intermittently, so that at one moment they could scarcely see before them, and the next the landscape steamed luxuriously in sunshine. The troops ahead of them were ambushed, which must mean that the Japanese had almost surrounded them. They were subjected to attacks by dive bombers. At some time in the appalling confusion, their brigade broke up into scattered groups. Ben, Geoffrey and Tandy found themselves in a unit of twelve men led by a harassed lieutenant who told them they must make for the Causeway at Johore Bahru, although he plainly had little idea how this commendable aim was to be achieved. They scrambled up hills made treacherous by the rain. They walked through a rubber plantation where a hysterical planter told them he would have them court martialled if they did not get off his land. They ran out of food; they drank water which made them ill; they had no protection against insects and leeches, and no medical supplies. They were constantly in hiding from an enemy who was prepared to wage war on bicycles if this was the best mode of transport in this terrain.
The transition from farce to tragedy was so swift, they could not have
said where the one ended and the other began. For the last few miles of their journey, they waded through bog. Ben and Geoffrey were stretcher bearers by this time, and they were weeping with exhaustion as they crossed the Causeway into Singapore. Tandy trudged beside them, nursing a broken arm. Two weeks later, on February 15th, Singapore surrendered.
One of Ben’s most vivid memories was of an Argyll piper playing his men across the Causeway just before it was blown up, to the tune of ‘Hieland Laddie’. Beneath Geoffrey’s drawing, Ben wrote, ‘Incident on the road from Bannockburn to Singapore.’
Shortly before Ben set out on his long sea voyage, Guy landed in Egypt. He, too, had had a long voyage, taking in Iceland, a detour into the South Atlantic to avoid submarine attack, a stay in Durban, before finally arriving in Egypt in the middle of August 1941. He had recently been promoted captain. Although by virtue of his service with the BEF he might regard himself as a veteran, his experience of fighting had been mainly in retreat. He looked to the desert warfare to rectify that.
By November, he was engaged in the fighting around Tobruk and was mentioned in dispatches for conspicuous gallantry while withstanding a tank attack outside Sidi Rezegh. He was himself surprised by the sheer exhilaration he experienced on this occasion. He felt no temptation to retreat, and, being unafraid, seemed to have ample time to calculate the situation. As a result, his gun crews held their fire until the last possible moment before engaging the enemy with some success.
He was living through a period when audacity seemed to pay high dividends, and he felt himself invulnerable. ‘When I was a boy,’ he wrote to Louise, ‘I used to think the cavalry represented the ultimate in courage and daring. But I now
see that as a sort of Wild West fantasy. All the cavalry did was to hurl itself unthinkingly forward (do you remember the amusing description of Sergius in Arms and the Man?). The real heroes, the people who display the greatest nerve and the finest capacity for cool judgement, are those who await the charge . . .’
He found rather more difficulty in commanding men off the field than on it. When they paused for a brew-up on a long journey, he would walk among them, trying to resolve the problem of seeming to be one of them, yet remaining their officer. He succeeded in looking rather like the King at a boy scout camp, shy and awkward, singing ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’ and having difficulty in co-ordinating the hand movements with the words. His conversation veered unpredictably between the mildly vacuous and the earnestly pretentious. He was overawed by one of his sergeants, a dour, leather-faced man, who took so long to reply to any remark addressed to him that on the occasions when Guy was rash enough to venture an opinion, he imagined it being filtered through the finest of hair sieves in order to test its veracity. It was a test which he had the feeling of constantly failing. He would sooner have found favour with Sergeant Baxter than be awarded the VC.
Sergeant Baxter notwithstanding, army life suited Guy. It had a great simplicity: the sensations aroused were pure – fear, ecstasy, thirst, pain. Modern warfare tended to eliminate that other ingredient, hatred. Guy was not a natural hater. The strange lack of confrontation – the opposing forces dispersed over wide spaces, engagements being more in the nature of intermittent clashes than fixed battles – had the effect of distancing the enemy so that at times he seemed almost non-existent. Above all, Guy was grateful for the lack of complexity in his new life. The things which had most disturbed him in civilian life had miraculously been removed from him: emotional conflicts between people he loved, responsibility for intricate negotiations at the office, the need to live on different levels – with his office colleagues, his clients, his wife and children, his parents; none of these troubled him here. There was a well- tested framework of decision-making in the Army, even if the results were sometimes deplorable. He might be called upon to die, but he was not likely to be unduly tested by alternatives. And if there was one thing the Army did effectively, it was to create a pattern of behaviour which went with the uniform: you had to be very determined if you were to be regarded as ‘unacceptable’ or ‘different’, both conditions which Guy dreaded. He worked hard, got on well with his fellow officers, and was considerate to his men; it gave him the feeling of a unified life. And there was the unexpected bonus that he did not appear to be afraid of death.
As a result of his state of mind, each of his letters home had the clarity of a painting, bold in outline and full of light and strong colour.
Alice wanted to serve abroad. This was not well received by her family. Claire had joined that part of the school which had been evacuated to Dorset. Her letters were frequent and unhappy. It was to be expected that she would be dismayed. Judith’s distress was understandable. What Alice had not anticipated was the strength of Louise’s disapproval. Alice thought Louise was being very unfair. She had stood resolutely by Louise in her time of trouble, and had assumed that whenever she herself needed support it would be forthcoming. It was her first experience of the painful truth that it is no use making investments of this nature. Love and loyalty must be given unconditionally, not as a loan to be repaid at the first call.
‘Daddy would understand,’ she told herself. The dead can always be relied upon for support. Granny Tippet also understood. ‘You must go, Alice,’ she wrote. ‘Your Mother didn’t hesitate to leave Falmouth when she had the chance.’
Quite apart from the question of loyalty, Alice found the decision a difficult one. She needed the protection of her mother and Louise, both of whom were strong and resilient. But however staunchly they might try to steer her through her troubles, there would be the wreckage and the rubble, and her father and Katia, to haunt her. It would all be grey and despairing. Alice wanted to find a way ahead that did not lead through the darkness. ‘Abroad’ appeared to be the answer. It seemed, however, that there must always be a cost to venturing, and that sometimes it is others who have to pay it. She would gain at the expense of her mother’s pain. This made her feel guilty, but not guilty enough to renounce her opportunities.
She was called to an overseas drafting board. The First Officer who presided was a woman every bit as daunting as Miss Blaize. Miss Blaize had had the air of one who has gazed on a scene of the utmost depravity; this woman looked as if she might actually have participated in it. The bags under her eyes reached almost to the tip of her nose, and her mouth twisted down in saturnine folds. She asked Alice whether she liked social life; and Alice, realizing that this woman was committing her to something very different from Miss Blaize’s life of service to the community, said emphatically that she did.
Friends later assured her that this had been the crucial question. ‘My dear, they’d never have sent you abroad if you had said you weren’t sociable – not with all those hungry men out there!’
Her mother and Louise were still in Sussex with the Braddons. They helped her to shorten the skirts of her tropical uniform when she spent her embarkation leave with them.
‘Just be careful out there,’ her mother said. ‘You haven’t been about much.’
‘We’ve been through all that. We’ve had lectures on the way the heat arouses the passions, and the need to talc between our toes, and we’ve been inoculated against everything except rabies!’
Alice had been in the WRNS for two years and gave the impression of being an old hand at almost everything. Her appearance suggested assurance. Judith had watched her doing her hair that morning. The hair was well-brushed and, offset by the dark uniform, seemed more golden than sandy. Alice drew it well back and rolled the ends up over a stocking so that it covered the tips of her ears and the nape of her neck like a draught excluder. She seemed as concerned to achieve this well-padded effect as she had once been to plump out her pigtails. There was no need now, though, to tell her not to waste time. Her fingers worked quickly, sticking hair pins in with precision. She knew what she was about. ‘How’s that?’ she asked when she had finished. But it was of herself that she asked the question, not her mother. She turned her head from side to side. ‘Not too low on the collar. It would pass muster, I daresay.’ She was wearing her uniform because most of her civilian clothes had been lost when the house was bombed. ‘I managed to wangle some lengths of material,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping I can get a few things made up out there.’ Men would notice her, Judith realized in surprise. The eyes were forthright. An uncomplicated girl, they would imagine; wholesome, but not without a bit of sauce.
The atmosphere between them was strained. Judith was aware of that tenacity of purpose in Alice which had always irked her. Grief had unbalanced her and she was as difficult to please as Stanley had been at his most unreasonable. It angered her if people made a fuss and it upset her if they did not; when they avoided talking about Stanley she wondered how they could be so unimaginative, and when they did talk about him they chose the wrong moment and she thought them insensitive. That Alice should choose to make this break so soon after her father’s death hurt Judith; although she herself had made a break by coming to Sussex when she could have stayed with Aunt May and Grandmother Fairley.
Louise was jealous. Her body cried out for the pleasures which Alice would experience. As she stitched up the heavy cotton skirt, she saw the fiery sun go down beyond the window. The first breeze of evening stole into the room; she felt its coolness between her body and the flimsy stuff of her dress. She went to the window, smelt the scented air; the breeze lightly lifted her hair, moved the sleeve of the diaphanous dress so that the outline of the arm was visible beneath it. A shiver of delight ran through her. The sun had warmed her whole being, giving not a superficial tan but a glow of the flesh. Someone was coming into the room, anticipation of him began at the base of her spine . .
. She looked down at her red, chafed hands holding the heavy cotton. What will become of me? she wondered.
It was a November afternoon, and the light was fading. Soon they would have to put the sewing aside because the only light was from oil lamps. The farmhouse, which had so enchanted them as children, seemed an uncomfortable place now. Beyond the window the land rose in blue-green folds towards the black line of the Downs. They could hear the children talking to someone in the stables; they at least sounded happy.
‘They are probably fraternizing with the enemy,’ Louise said.
‘What are the Italians like?’ Alice asked.
‘They work hard.’ Louise was noncommittal, aware of her mother watching her as she answered.
‘I wouldn’t mind living in the country,’ Alice said.
‘You don’t know what you want.’ Louise rounded on her angrily. ‘First you wanted to live in Holland Park, now it’s the country; and when you’ve been in the desert, I suppose you’ll want to live there, too! It’s never-never land with you – Kashmir and the like.’
‘I don’t often think of Kashmir now,’ Alice said.
Later in the evening, Alice ironed the dresses in the kitchen, while the others listened to the news on the wireless. She worked by the light of a candle. The oil was used sparingly because Meg Braddon said every time she lit the lamp she thought of the men who died in tankers. While she was working, there was a gentle knock on the kitchen door; when she opened it, one of the Italian prisoners of war was standing there. He seemed awkward, confronted by her. He was very dark, like a gypsy, with sad black eyes which flicked quickly about the room while he asked, haltingly, for water. Alice filled the jug which he handed to her and he went away looking disconsolate.
The candlelight flickered in the draught from the door. Alice remembered holidays with Claire when they had gone to bed carrying candles, pleasurably afraid of the leaping shadows. What companions she and Claire had been then! Outside in the yard, one of the dogs was barking, a note of alarm in the sound – perhaps the Italian was still moving about, or he could hear a fox. She thought of Rumpus. ‘He must have been terrified, all alone . . . the poor little dog!’ The small grief touched upon a deeper, buried grief, and she cried as she had been unable to in the past weeks, repeating desolately over and over again, ‘Oh Rumpus, Rumpus. . .’