The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  Donald was lending him books which he was reading as if literature were food and he was starving. The books were in a pile on the hall table. He would take one up to his room to read, then return it to its place and choose another. He saw his mother stand by the books, then open one. Spender.

  ‘“I think continually of those who were truly great”,’ he said, sharing with her something of the richness he had discovered; and he thought that this was the first time he had let her in to his private self. She nodded, smiling. ‘I like that,’ she said. There were books in a bookshelf, but he did not remember her reading them. They were mostly war books, and that was the reason he had not touched them. They were his father’s and shared with him the aura of Don’t Touch.

  Now his mother said, ‘“I saw a host of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” I learned that at school.’

  He said, lowering his voice – his father was in the room next door – ‘“It seemed that out of battle I escaped”.’ And she looked over her shoulder, and said, in a whisper, ‘No, don’t, don’t, he wouldn’t …’ And she walked quickly away.

  When his father had gone to the pub and his mother was upstairs, James knelt by the bookcase and pulled out the books one by one. All Quiet on the Western Front. And Quiet Flows the Don. The Battle of the Somme. Passchendaele. Goodbye to All That. An Old Soldier Remembers. If They Should Die … If They Should Ask Us … Three shelves full.

  In spring 1939 James was called up, with the young men in the age group 20 to 21. His father said, ‘That’s right, that’s what young men are for.’ And he got to his feet with emphasis and went to the pub.

  Donald had been called up, and when James went to visit he found that boisterous house clamorous with argument, even more than usual. The two older brothers assumed they would be next. The girls were in tears because their boyfriends were in the same age group as Donald and James.

  ‘There can’t possibly be a war, it would be too terrible,’ said the pacifist mother, and one daughter. ‘We have to stop Hitler,’ said the father and sons and the other daughter. These were the points of view to be heard on the wireless, in the newspapers, exchanged everywhere. ‘With the weapons there are now, no one could be stupid enough to go to war.’

  The two young men actually about to be shovelled into the army, smiled a lot and went off together to a debate in the nearby town: ‘Is It too Late for Peace?’ Donald spoke passionately from the floor that Hitler must be stopped now, otherwise we would all be slaves. A woman in the audience stood up to say that her fiancé and two brothers had been killed in the last war, and if the young ones present knew what war was like they would be pacifists like her. A man of her age, that is to say one presumably schooled in war, asked her sarcastically if she believed her fiancé and brothers would have liked the idea of living like slaves under Hitler, and she shouted at him, ‘Yes, yes. Better alive than dead.’ An old woman said that it was time they remembered the white feathers that were handed out to cowards in the last war: that was how she felt. The arguments grew so loud and bitter the platform had to call for order, and then ask the ushers to escort out a youth who said the white-feather woman should be shot, she was disgusting.

  His father told James, ‘They’re going to lick you into shape. That’s what they call it. They’ll make a man of you. You get yourself made an officer. You’ll have it easier that way. You’ll be officer material, with your education.’

  James and Donald went together to the call-up centre in Reading. James had run and played cricket and football for the school, and expected to be told that he was a hundred per cent fit. He was, with the proviso that he must watch out for an old football injury, a torn ligament in his knee, which now could be seen as a thin white scar. Donald was told he was overweight, but the army would cure him of that. All day they were in a large hall, in a mill of sweaty, smelly young men, many from homes that had no bathroom. All the same age: Donald joked that they had reached the age for the slaughterhouse, like lambs or calves. He sounded cheerful about it. The same age, but far from the same shape. Many were thin, and most were short: Donald and James were taller, and their bones were well-covered. Their assiduous attention to the facts of British life had taught them that the working classes subsisted on bread and margarine sprinkled with sugar, and bread and dripping, with cups of very strong tea, full of sugar. ‘Sugar is food.’ Here were the results, these pallid, undersized men. Some were being discarded because they had rickets, many sent to the dentist because of rotting teeth.

  Plans were made for another visit to Donald’s, but the summons came first. The war was boiling up while people still talked pacifism, it heated debates and the contents of the News, it seethed in people’s veins and in their minds, and it ejected James and Donald out from ordinary life into camp.

  James spread his uniform on his bed, and fitted bits of it to himself. His room, usually a quiet, unassertive place, was littered with martial reminders in khaki.

  James was a tall, slim young man, quick and alert, everything about him fine and nervy. He had a thin nose, a long curved beautiful mouth, too often made narrow with the tension of determination. His eyes were long, a luminous blue, and his hair was a pale shining brown. His brows were delicate, glistening. He had about him the sleekness of a healthy animal. But when he at last had got the uniform on himself, he was made dull and awkward. He looked at himself in the long mirror on the landing and thought that the girl at the Socialists for Justice Summer School who had said, ‘But you’re lovely, you’re like a film star,’ would not say that to him now. He went downstairs, saw his mother sitting under the lamp, with a magazine, the radio jiggling dance music. She glanced up, and her hand flew to her mouth and she said in a gasp, ‘Oh, no.’ Then she stood up, all apology, and said, ‘Darling, you look very nice, it was the shock, that’s all.’ And she tried to embrace this soldier, but the thickness of the cloth he was inside absorbed the embrace, negated it.

  His neck was already being chafed and his boots were too large. They were blocks on his feet. She said she would try to soften them, and she warmed them in the steam from the kettle, and rubbed fat into them, while he stood in his socks, his long feet curled towards each other like creatures trying to escape their fate. She warmed and rubbed for an hour or more, and he tried the boots on and said they were better. His feet were narrow, that was the trouble.

  Next day he put the uniform on ‘for the duration’, joking with the new phrase that made people who used it feel full of fortitude and modest courage.

  ‘But perhaps there won’t be a war,’ said his mother.

  ‘Yes, perhaps it’ll all come to nothing.’

  His father said goodbye, barking at him that he mustn’t believe them if they said it would be over by Christmas. ‘They’re full of their own nonsense.’ Meaning? The War Office? The Government? His eyes were mad with the anguish of the old war.

  ‘Bye, Dad,’ said James, gently, and went to the gate and turned to see the parents standing together, his mother’s arm through the old soldier’s, patting it. Like a postcard, he thought, defiantly refusing pathos. ‘Off to War.’ He was thinking, as he had done pretty often during the last year of ferment and discovery that it would have been better if his dad had been killed in the Trenches. Well, wouldn’t it? What a misery his life had been … wouldn’t he himself say so? But at least his mother had got a husband, which was more than could be said for many women. No one can imagine themselves not born. With his father dead in the last war, then James would not be marching along the pavement in his painful boots. His derisive mind was commenting, Cannon fodder for the next war. Funny how many phrases out of stock he had used all his life, but never thought about them.

  He met Donald at the train and they travelled together in a carriage full of young men in new uniforms, and then in two buses, soldiers with civilians, whose faces told them they were now in a category apart. Feared? Disliked? Pitied? Wary faces, and some eyes reminded James of his fathers. Twenty y
ears: some of these people had been through the last war. Then they were at the gates of a camp where a couple of corporals stood, to wave them on. The youngsters walked in ones and twos, straggling along to a large hut, where they gave their names, and new numbers, and were directed again through lines of Nissen huts, set out as regularly as the squares on a chess board. At a junction in lanes between huts, Donald had to go in one direction and he in another. This was a blow to James, but he knew not so much to Donald, who went off with a bunch of young men he had never seen before as if they were all old friends. It seemed that the alphabet was dividing them, ‘An R and an E – never the twain shall meet,’ James tried to jest. He went alone to a hut that would hold twenty men. Ten beds on one side and ten on the other, with a kind of cubicle or cubby-hole for the supervising corporal. Like school. The young men were moving about, standing about, constantly looking around, like animals in a new place who do not yet know from what quarter danger will come. Corporal Jones was giving them time to settle in, with only mild instructions about kit and the proper maintenance of their bunks, when a sergeant arrived and behaved exactly as expected, shouting directions at them which might just as well have been given in an ordinary voice. Then supper, in a big shed: too large to be called a hut. The first shift, a couple of hundred young men, the food not to their liking, or too much of it for anxious stomachs: a lot was left on the plates, and a sergeant, standing with his hands on his hips, yelled at them that he would personally see to it that soon they would be so hungry they’d not be leaving anything on their plates.

  In the hut twenty young men tried to combat the dismay of unfamiliarity, their equipment and clothes all over the place, while the corporal threatened them with the imminent appearance of the sergeant.

  The youths were complaining they were not used to sleeping so early, when the sergeant arrived to say he would overlook their crimes tonight, but from now on if he saw such a scene as this they’d all be for the high jump. That was his first message to them: the second was that they were not so much as to think about asking for sleeping pills if they slept badly, because it would be his happy duty to see to it that they would be so tired from this day on they would sleep as their heads hit their pillows.

  All this was as expected, for most of these young men had fathers or relatives from the last war, who had instructed them in the ways of the army. ‘Their bark is worse than their bite,’ most of them had heard.

  Now the corporal retired to his kennel and the men talked in low voices, grumbling about the hard bunks and pillows, and James knew that, never mind about the school of life, the school of school was turning out to be a blessing. One youth, Private Jenkins, said that anything would be a picnic after boarding school: in this way James located the other person in his hut who might turn out to be officer material. They took each others measure in some facetious remarks, and the silence that followed told James that this scene might be put into a lecture on Class Structure. Most of these young men could never have dreamed of the amenities of boarding school. ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ summed up the youth, Paul Bryant, in the bunk next to James, but without hostility. It turned out that James and Private Jenkins had little to say to each other: whereas this Paul, whose father delivered coal to the cellars of Sheffield, became his friend.

  Next day the men from this hut and four others, one hundred of them, met in a building that had been a village hall and took lessons in equipment and how to look after it. From the windows they saw the spreading camp, whose severity of regularity nevertheless gave an impression of the improvised, the impermanent. It was raining so hard in gleaming rods that water was jumping up white and frothy to knee height: the knees of a platoon marching through it on their way to somewhere. All that day instruction went on, and when James confessed his boots hurt, hardening himself for blows of contempt from the sergeant’s tongue, he was ready to hear that he had better get the right fucking boots this time because he wasn’t going to hear any fucking excuses about sore feet tomorrow, when drilling would begin.

  The equipment corporal took trouble over him, lifting down from shelves boots and more boots, saying, ‘You’d better get your feet right, because if feet are not right then nothing is.’ James’s feet were difficult, all the boots were too wide. He was going to have to wear two pairs of socks. He felt like a penguin he had watched walking with its feet apart along the edge of a pool, as if its crotch were sore, as his was. Everywhere the thick uniform rubbed and chafed.

  Then the drilling began, two platoons from this hut, and the young men were made one because of the intensity of their exhaustion, their anger against the sergeant; and James’s discomfort in his uniform and his unhappy feet became absorbed into a general torment. But, deeper than that, he was sustained by a pride that he was sticking it out. As were they all.

  Ten weeks. He drilled with his platoon, then with the company. He ran at straw sacks representing human beings with his bayonet, and came to know his equipment so well his rifle was – as the sergeant told them it would be – his best friend. All this, while a quietly derisive private commentary ran in his head, which he could not share, because it was in the language of his education, and he could not match the half-inarticulate communications of his fellow soldiers, all obscenities and the ritualised angers of the common soldier.

  Twice he offended, once by not cleaning his boots properly, and once by not standing quickly enough to attention, which crimes he expiated by peeling potatoes for a day, and doing guard duty at night.

  Towards the end of this endurance test his knee played up, and it was strapped tight, like a mummy’s. A bloody ligament was not going to get in the way of Sergeant Baxter’s intention to turn him into a soldier. And so they emerged, a camp full of young men, several hundreds of them, licked into shape, made men of, made one, and they were informed they were off to another camp, west, while their training camp accepted another batch of recruits whom James’s lot looked on with compassion and ritualised jeering for form’s sake. ‘They don’t know what they’re in for, poor sods,’ etc, while they were marched off to buses and trains.

  Before that there was a weekend leave at home, which James hated. He knew his father did, and suspected his mother did too. He tried to imagine what it could be like, seeing your precious young that you’ve fussed over for twenty odd years sent off to war as cannon fodder; but like many thoughts about his mother, he could not persist with them. They did not fall into the category of the mockeries that accompanied his days and nights at the way things were managed, the jeers at Authority – the soldier’s necessary offset to obedience. His mother’s life – oh, no, he didn’t want to think about it. He saw her on those evenings at home, sitting under the lamp, the radio jiggling or crooning away at her elbow, knitting a sweater. For him, he wouldn’t be surprised. Her eyes were lowered to her work: she didn’t knit automatically, as some women do, their hands apparently able to read patterns by themselves while their owners chat or even read. Or perhaps his mother kept her eyes hidden so people couldn’t see what she was thinking. What thoughts? And she looked defenceless, sitting there alone, her husband in the pub with his war pals, waiting up for him. It made James angry, but angry with what? This was not like being angry at the army or the sergeant. For twenty years his mother had sat there under the lamp knitting, alone. Then his father would come in, smelling of beer, go and wash his face and brush his teeth, because she hated the smell, and the two went off to bed. Being angry with his father was hardly the point. But he could have taken a bayonet and stuck it into someone – who? Gone shouting about the streets, No, no, no, no.

  Instead he kissed his mother goodbye, gave his father’s obdurate shoulder a friendly and filial clout, and went off to the West Country.

  There, several hundred young men exercised and drilled, but not as obsessively as in the first camp. It was boring. In between the drills and exercises he lay on his bed and read poetry, and so did Paul Bryant. He had become for Paul what Donald had been for hi
m. This man, who had left school at fourteen, took to poetry as James had done. He had more difficulty, though: long words were a problem. But James relived his own final intoxications with words when he saw Paul Bryant’s eyes shine, thanking him for the loan of a volume.

  ‘I like this one,’ he would say. ‘I do like this one …’ What the coalman’s son who had scarcely been out of a town liked was poems about the country.

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Is hung with bloom along the bough

  or

  I went out to the hazel wood

  Because afire was in my head …

  ‘Have you got any more like that?’ he would ask, shy, but determined, in a way that reminded James of his younger self, of a couple of years back.

  They and a few others were luckier than the majority, who were bored, bored. There was nothing to amuse them. Not enough girls, and beer ran out in the pubs, when there were evening passes. Bored and frustrated young men, hundreds of them, but then began the war, which at first dawdled and delayed, but at last there was the first invasion of France, and off they went, to end on the beaches of Dunkirk. James missed it all. His knee had swelled up and he was in hospital, having it drained.

  Of his platoon five were killed and two wounded. His platoon was merged with another, similarly diminished. His unit – his family – gone. And Paul, his friend, was in hospital with a head wound. James heard that Donald was wounded while in a boat coming back from Dunkirk. He got weekend leave to visit Donald, whose head was bandaged, and so was his arm. He looked pretty bad, but before James had even entered the ward the nurses told him that Donald was the life and soul of the place. ‘He keeps us all cheerful.’ People came in to Donald’s room to joke, to have a laugh, and a youth was there when James arrived, and was there when he took his leave, sitting on a visitor’s chair watching Donald, bemused with admiration. James thought: that was me. Donald needs his acolyte, he needs someone to educate, well, fair enough.