HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour (1947) (13 page)

‘It’s a temptation, too.’ I kissed you. ‘Let’s try it, some other time.’

‘All right. What now?’

I still wasn’t sure. ‘Have I disappointed you?’

You shook your head. ‘Part of being married – one of the best parts – is being able to tell each other that sort of thing without the roof blowing off. How shall we spend the time, sweet? I’ve got some shopping to do, if you’re feeling energetic enough for a walk.’

I laughed in my turn. ‘That should cool the blood.’

‘Then we’d better apply it, here and now.’ For a moment you lay quiet in my arms, your beating heart seeming to be still playing the scene of a few moments ago, unable to leave what it really wanted; then you sat up and smoothed your hair. ‘I’ll get ready, darling.’

I stared up at you. ‘Don’t fade out too completely, sweet. It
will
keep, won’t it?’

You winked, and said: ‘That I can guarantee.’ The wink itself was a flawless tag-line, exactly what we wanted to close the scene and carry over to our exit.

Wartime London is not gay, except for those running in rose-coloured blinkers. It is shabby and nostalgic: it needs cleaning, painting, doing over: much of it is laid waste, and the bare lots and tangled ruins of the old blitz days are never handsome, though they may beget a handsome sort of pride.

Pride is perhaps a London keynote nowadays – the excusable pride of endurance: and to walk slowly through a few London streets, as you and I did on that sunny afternoon, is to have that pride stirred and gently awakened again, without bombast but without shyness either. Odd things serve to do it, things that Londoners take for granted: a bare level space where a friend’s house used to be: kids swimming in a firetank: a staircase still clinging to a flower-patterned wall and leading drunkenly nowhere: a foolish heart-warming sign over a wrecked shop – ‘YES, WE ARE BLASTED WELL OPEN!’ … They are part of this fine city, whose recent history has probably been her finest.

I myself have a special feeling about London: I was born there: I have lived there all my life, and I cannot really live anywhere else. I was there for some of the worse blitzes, and on the night that the City was in flames. It might well have been the end of the world, that night: it was in any case a pretty good imitation of hell; but somehow we knew that it wasn’t the end of London. That would take more than a German frenzy of destruction, however competently executed. And hell or not, I would rather have been there to share the ordeal, than have read about it afterwards and mourned the destruction at a distance. What one might call the St Crispin’s Day complex did not finish with Agincourt.

I think Londoners, by reason of that long-continued ordeal, have much to be proud of – collectively proud, that is, not just complacent and self-satisfied. Little people, fighting above ground or sweating it out in cellars, made London a big place in those days: individually, they drop back into littleness again, but the proud city that was in their charge remains – loved and laughed at, cried for and cherished.

I lost my own flat then – that was before I met you, when I was on leave after Dunkirk. It was one of the lesser blitzes, one that hardly made the headlines: but one building only needs one bomb for its disposal, and I returned from the country to find the house in the roadway and what was left of my clothes being collected into a heap by a tired and grim air-raid warden. I had not known, till then, how private were some of my possessions … I lost everything I had – furniture, books, pictures, gramophone records, letters – and I didn’t give a damn. I thought I would mind tremendously, but that thought had been tied to a vanished tradition, and somehow it seemed the most natural thing in the world to start afresh, owning virtually nothing at all, while the country was under the threat of invasion, the Home Guard pretended valiantly that they were armed, and the massed air raids began.

It was part of being an Englishman: the current price of nationality. A lot of people, myself included, think it is no price at all.

We went shopping at a leisurely pace. You wanted (of all things) a christening mug. I wanted a sponge: both of them were hard to come by and both, when we found them, ridiculously expensive. (I really don’t know who buys small shrivelled sponges at two pounds sixteen shillings and sixpence a time: only bloody fools like me, probably.) But it was fun to be your escort, and to watch you while you talked to people and tried to charm them into producing what they manifestly had not got: fun also to feel that I was the proprietor of an exceptionally lovely person whom a lot of people were staring at. I know you don’t dislike my feeling like that about you, or I would not mention such a quintessence of masculine conceit. But it is a fact that when I am with you I have that sense of proprietorship very strongly all the time: it seems to me to be one of the more precious facets of marriage, that loving awareness that you belong to me absolutely, and are content to do so.

There was no doubt, by the way, that people stared at you: indeed, there seemed at times to be nothing but eyes all round us, admiring or speculative or purely covetous. I suppose you are used to it by now, as all beautiful women must be, and that it needs no effort of composure to meet or ignore these glances, and that the sort of physical shyness which makes a young girl, for instance, fold her arms across her bosom when she is standing among strangers, is in the dim past, as far as you are concerned. But it still must be odd to know that you are watched and commented on for nearly all your waking hours; it must be difficult also not to develop a tough or defensive manner, both unattractive, in order to counter it.

I remember once, when I said something about it to you, you answered: ‘That’s only a tiny part of being a woman. You have to take it in your stride: sometimes it makes you furious, sometimes it’s a lovely tonic, and you’d feel furious if it
didn’t
happen. It’s been going on for so many thousands of years anyway that we must have a sort of inherited talent for dealing with it … But there are other things a hundred times more worrying, which seem to have been gradually pushed on to women: things like preserving self-control not only in yourself but in the person who may be trying to break it down. It’s unfair, really, that we should be expected to have enough self-control for two, and that chastity should be
our
responsibility, but it almost always is: given opportunity and a plain choice, few men will help you ...’

‘That’s a low estimate.’

‘But isn’t it true, sweet? Most men, if the opportunity is given them, will have at least one try, just to prove they’re grown-up … It’s something we have to be competent about, anyway – dealing with all comers, from the lamb to the wolf, and never hurting the one or flattering the other. And even that only touches the fringe of it: there’s something else far more important in womanhood – the fact of being, at the back of it all, the most vital element in nature, the matrix of life. That’s what never quite leaves you, if you are really aware of being a woman: the fact that you carry the touchstone of the whole design in your own body. It’s complex – and completely fascinating. I wouldn’t be a man for any money you like.’

On this bright afternoon, while we walked about and people looked at you, I remembered that conversation and decided, once again, that you really knew far more of what it was all about than I did ...

No one looked at me, because I was a soldier.

A soldier … Airmen have the glamour, sailors make people smile: soldiers excite no reaction at all, save (sometimes) impatience or a faint derision. We know about it, and accept it as a natural outcome of recent history, but I think it is unfair. It sprang, inevitably from Dunkirk, and Singapore and Norway and Crete – all the places where British soldiers, matching flesh against steel, proved their humanity by ceasing a futile resistance. Does that sound like whining? Probably, coming from a soldier, it does; and yet the excuse is put forward to clear, not the Army, but the whole country that lies behind it, and that is where the unfairness comes in. To my mind, we – the soldiers – were made the scapegoats for the scored feelings of all Great Britain: the effect of those failures – the retreats, the surrenders, the basic flops – was so mortally felt by the British people that they tried to salve their pride in laughter, at the expense of the men who were immediately involved.

Defeat on the battlefield, instead of being entered as a debit in the
national
ledger, was dismissed as a purely Service fiasco, only to be expected from pongoes with falsetto words of command and curly moustaches.

That may sound over-subtle, but I think it is true. When people see a soldier they are reminded of their own shortcomings and failures, of errors of policy and lack of foresight: they would like to concentrate their attack on these, but the soldier is the handier target, and so they get him in their sights and start sniping. In some quarters, slow to react or unable to read headlines, that sniping has never ceased.

We accept it, as I say … But the next time you see a soldier, and feel like shrugging your shoulders and muttering, ‘Dunkirk harrier’ or any other neat epithet, just remember that the weapons you gave him, to fight at Dunkirk and a lot of other places, were
your
blunder and
your
disgrace.

All of which is a long way from that day of ours, and I suspect that it is only jealousy of your monopoly of the public regard which makes me mention it … When we had done our shopping it was time for tea: the effect of the whisky was ebbing rapidly, leaving behind it that residue of dry-mouthed yawns, which only an armchair and a soft drink can cure. These we found, in an unlikely-looking hotel where I had never been before, full of holy calm and the more captious sort of old lady: we sat in the lounge, feeling young and preoccupied with each other and tremendously superior to our surroundings. It seemed to us, for that short interlude, that we were the only people in the room who had ever been properly alive – the usual denial, by the young, that the old can ever have enjoyed themselves or found life exciting and hopeful and concentrated. We looked round us – knew you were doing it too – and wondered arrogantly why, after leading such wasted lives, these people could behave with such curious assurance. Good heavens, we must be the only couple with hangovers who ever had stepped inside the door … Without doubt, we ourselves would be regarded with the same good-natured contempt by the next generation: and without doubt we in our turn would be roused to laughter or a fuming impatience by young people who knew everything for the first time in history … That is a war which will never end, and both sides, slugging away manfully, extract the maximum of entertainment from it.

As soon as we were on our way again, and strolling towards the hotel: ‘What shall I give you as a going-away present?’ you asked me. ‘I’ve quite a lot of money. What would you like, out of the whole of London?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I want to give you something.’

‘You’re doing that all the time.’

‘Something to take away with you, so that you can look at it and remember today. Do you want anything to wear? Something to keep you warm?’

I laughed. ‘You’ll get no information from me that way. I’m not saying whether I’ll need to be kept warm or cool – or even whether I’ll be wearing clothes at all.’

‘Difficult … When will I know, darling?’

‘What?’

‘Where you are, and how far away?’

‘I don’t know, sweet. Not very soon, I’m afraid. You mustn’t worry if there’s a bit of a gap before any letters arrive.’ That was the most I could say of a journey which I knew was going to take me half across the world and away from you for a minimum of two years. It was that desolate prospect which I did not know how to keep from coming between us, or rather from so affecting my manner and spirit that it would destroy the day altogether. This was our first real parting, and without being able to practise on something less ruthless and final I did not know how to deal with it. I wanted tremendously to share the whole thing with you, telling you all I knew and feared, as well as the credit side of it – the fact that the job was exceptionally worthwhile and might pay a notable dividend that would have been a relief of an obvious sort; but the blanket of absolute secrecy which had been placed over the near future made it impossible.

I knew then that I would have to feel the crux of our parting quite privately, and somehow conceal the fact that the assignment I was going on meant extreme hazard in scarcely tolerable surroundings, and my conviction that the majority of my regiment would be slaughtered in the process.

Of course, I knew also that by the morning you would have guessed most of it, though you might not tell me so and might not even refer to it again. Even at this stage of our marriage, we were too close to each other for you not to divine so strong a feeling in me. The thing would be like a sword lying between us all the time … And I am a bad actor, where the hiding of emotion is concerned. None worse, in fact.

But that was still over the horizon … Your present to me turned out to be a pair of fur-lined bedroom slippers – or rather boots – of such elegance and splendour that they obviously had no idea there was a war on.

The play we had chosen to see, and for which the same hall porter had somehow managed to get us two perfect seats, was Congreve’s
Love for Love
. I sometimes wonder by what astonishing stroke of luck it happened that this admirable play, performed by a distinguished cast headed by John Gielgud, should have been available for us on just the night we needed it most. It was exactly what we wanted: a play of love, witty, lecherous, and delightful, which dealt with formal and civilized amours in a world which enjoyed them for their own sake and was neither jealous nor censorious of the diversions of others. We needed and welcomed it for so many reasons, divers and cogent; for the wit it lavished on us, for its inherent promise that the springs of the mind and the heart would never be choked, for the plain sensual excitement which it induced, it is above all a play to be watched by lovers who can laugh together with tenderness and passion, who can mock their own fervour and still be consumed by it. It was, therefore, a play for us.