The Grandmothers (35 page)

He at once organised a concert party, using an impressive number of the troops, but the audience was bound to outnumber performers by many times to one. James was roped in: he was a girl, but this did not bother him at all: not for him the protests and bad jests obligatory at such moments. In his mind he often embraced the loveliest woman in the world, and he was the father of a delightful boy child. He surprised himself and the audience with his vigorous interpretation of a coy maiden. Jack showed a talent for this kind of thing and was soon writing sketches for Donald. Then Donald put on Priestley’s They Came to a City, that play which during the war more than any other embodied idealistic and perfervid dreams for a better life. He ventured on Shakespeare and Twelfth Night. The soldiers went to see it because there was nothing better to do, but were persuaded that they enjoyed it. Some did.

They Came to a City sparked a demand for debates. The first was: ‘A Socialist Britain’. A noisy success. Soon Donald had lectures and debates going as well as concert parties. He organised a library - how, no one seemed to know. He begged and borrowed books, failing to return them; he went into the town’s clubs and posted up notices begging for books. When there was a demand for a book on a socialist economy, and no such book was in the camp library, he actually wrote a thick pamphlet himself and got it cyclostyled in fifty copies - there was a paper shortage, so he scrounged and probably stole paper.

At all debates and lectures a Political Officer was present, taking notes. The debate, ‘Quit India Now’ (Now being somewhat hypothetical: ‘There’s a War On - didn’t you know?’) was the theme of a letter to the camp newspaper, which Donald seemed to have taken over. When people complained that he was running a one-man show, he said, ‘Right, then, why don’t you muck in? Come on - start a camp newsletter, we could do with one.’ The complainer did start a newsletter, the gossip of the camp, but it languished and soon Donald was running that.

Donald was summoned by Authority and told that there were limits and he was testing them. No more lectures on the political situation m India - understood?

‘How about a series on the history of India?’

‘Fair enough,’ Authority agreed.

But did not history include the British contribution, he argued, blandly, when taxed about the titles of the last three lectures: ‘Clive of India: The Flag Follows Trade.’ ‘The East India Company.’ ‘The British Empire: Cain or Loss.’ Once again, standing to attention in front of a bench of senior officers, he argued that he had been given permission for history, hadn’t he? He was sure he had. Captain Hargreaves, who had said in Administration that he thought the India lectures were just the ticket, he could do with more of that, supported Donald, who asked why was it not in order for British soldiers who were fighting for democracy to hear the arguments on both sides? So he argued, pleasantly, the model of earnest willingness to serve.

The lectures went ahead, the Other Ranks making an issue of it, attending them in force: it turned out that two of the lectures were being given by senior officers who were experts on this very subject. And at the question and answer sessions Donald stood up to say that it was not for them to reason why (the poem had appeared in his newspaper): they might listen but on no account could they express their thoughts.

This was an impertinence so finely honed that Authority was at a loss what to do, but around the camp flew the rumour that severe punishment was being planned, using the extreme penalty for sedition.

Real rebellion, if not sedition, did simmer. Years of boredom and the appalling heat were raising everyone’s moral temperature, and even without Donald’s inflammatory presence, all through the soldiers’ huts, Other Ranks were arguing about their own role in all this, the role of the British Army, Donald put on As You Like h. Who would have recognised in this flirtatious not to say winsome Rosalind the serious unsmiling young man whom everyone tended for some reason to leave alone. He didn’t drink much; he didn’t shine at the Officers’ Mess; he did play cricket well enough; when it was his turn to be camp librarian he was helpful, full of information. He was friendly with Other Ranks, who seemed actually to like him. And here he was, being applauded as Rosalind.

From the Sergeants’ Mess came a little bouquet of flowers with a card, ‘To Fair Rosalind’. And the obligatory obscenities. If the sergeants played their traditional barking punishing role on the parade ground, they were tending toward good humour and even behaviour that could be described as avuncular, off it. The long ordeal of Camp X was wearing them down: ‘Like a mother to us,’ jested some young officers, for, no longer under the rule ot the sergeants, but their nominal superiors while obeying their advice in everything, they could afford to jest. This jest reached the ears of Sergeant Perkins, who came into the hut occupied by James and Jack, saluted, and said, ‘Right, then, if I’m your mother, then I have to say the condition of this hut is a crying shame. Better clean it up before Captain Hargreaves gets to hear about it.’ And, saluting, he went out.

The senior officers were in a dilemma. They knew all about the sedition that was brewing, even if it was sporadic and disorganised, and they knew that Donald was a focus. But boredom was the parent of this mischief and Donald combated boredom. Without him things would be worse. It was a question of balance. When the senior officers attended debates and lectures, it was not - as the paranoid soldiers believed - to spy on them but because the officers were as bored as they were. ‘The Atlantic Charter Unmasked’, ‘Whither Egypt?” Imperialism Past and Present’.

In James’s desk was a calendar where a big red cross marked the Birth date of his son, Jimmy Reid. He had worked out the babe’s probable entrance to the world. He secretly celebrated the child’s first birthday and then his second. Another visit to the hills, with the Grants, allowed him to see the two-year-old, an explosion of charm and mischief. He adored that little boy and when he left the hills he had to hide tears. It is not possible to feel the pain of loss unchanged for ever. James’s grief had mellowed; it was there, but no longer was able to lay him low at a sound, a voice, the colour of the evening sky, a line of poetry, a bird’s call. He had not realised how much this cherished love, or grief, had diminished, but leaving that child it all came back, and Colonel Grant was reminded to say again, ‘Easy does it, James. Take it easy. ‘And Mrs Grant, ‘How nice it is to see a young man taking an interest in children. Well done.’ Those of us who have lived through such a time, the interminable time that need have no end - so it seems - know that what is left behind of the three, four years of endlessness is fear of being trapped again, but what is to be done about war? - tangling people in nets of circumstances. Nothing. Soldiers in India - who would have thought it, let’s say in I939, as the war was being adumbrated in rousing speeches, that one of the results would be hundreds of thousands of young men, stuck like flies on a flypaper in India - not to mention Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, defending the bad against the worse. No one in I939 wrote a poem beginning, ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’. Donald Enright actually managed a lecture, ‘Defending the Bad Against the Worse’, and was reprimanded. ‘But we’re fighting for democracy!’ he beamed at his superior officers, who frowned at bin], uneasy, as unwilling to grasp this problem as they would lie to take up a fistful of hot coals. He was a wonder, this Donald Enright, with his concert parties and his Shakespeare and his lectures. Who could deny it? ‘We told you before, you’re sailing too close to the wind.’ ‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I was rather thinking of a debate on “Problems of the Peace, Socialism or Capitalism?” Would that be in order, sir?’

You could look at Camp X, stuck there in the middle of India - looking with a non-military, unimpartial eye - as an arbitrary aggregation of hundreds of young men, united only by a uniform.

Which is how at times they saw themselves. Take this ditty, emerging somewhere from the collective unconscious of the camp:

There’s a war on,

You tell us they say there’s a war on,

Bur where’s the war, the bloody, bloody war,

Glean your boots,

Check your kit,

Stand to attention,

Slant! at ease,

Mind your Q’s, mind your P’s,

There’s a bloody war on.

Several hundreds of young men kept together by the uniform and the merest framework of discipline, the prescribed measures of saluting, the Yes Sirs, the No Sirs, the drills, and meanwhile months no, years, now - of the upper ranks and the Other Ranks too made equal (almost) by a hundred non-military occasions, the concert parties, the theatre shows, the lectures: surely this must have frayed the fabric of discipline into ineffectiveness? Not so. First, the rumour: We’re being sent north-east to fight the bloody Japs. At once it was as if the whole camp snapped to attention. Then, the hard fact. It was true. Camp X fizzed with elation, they might be going off to a festival, not certain danger and possible death. At last, they would justify themselves, the whole bloody lunacy of their being here at all would make sense. James, too, as excited as the rest, but then, brought down: his name was not on the lists: he was not going.

He sat in Administration behind his desk, all other desks but one deserted. At each desk a typewriter, folders, loose papers stirring in sluggish air from a dozen ceiling fans that chug-chugged like motors, and James’s mouth was a hard ugly line and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. Captain Hargreaves was here to calm and to defuse, because it was in Administration that faces like James’s were to be expected.

Second Lieutenant Reid and Captain Hargreaves were on Jimmy and Tommy terms except for sometimes, like now.

‘Tommy,’ began James, still sitting, but saw his superior officer’s monitoring frown and he stood up. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it isn’t fair.’

Captain Hargreaves merely smiled, but James persisted. ‘It simply isn’t fair, it isn’t good enough - sir.’

Why me? could have come next, but shame suppressed it.

‘Someone has to stay and keep things going, you know that, Second Lieutenant. We can’t just march off and leave the place empty.’

James was quivering with the arbitrary injustice of it all.

His senior officer went on, ‘There will be ten of us left in Administration, and some for Other Duties.’

James remained at attention.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ offered the captain but went red because of the bathos. He stood up.

‘Are you going with the rest, sir?’

‘Yes. As it happens. I am.’ And he escaped.

Later, walking across to the Officers’ Mess, James encountered Major Briggs, who saw from the young man’s state that he must stop, so he stopped.

James saluted.

‘] know what you are going to say, Lieutenant. But someone has to stay. And you are good at it. You can blame yourself if you like.’

This joke fell well short of its target. James knew he was good at it. Pen-pushing and Admin; that’s what he was good at.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait … but you won’t be doing much of” that. You’ll be working pretty hard, I’d say.’

‘But perhaps they don’t serve so much, sir?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ And the major put an end to this miserable conversation, because he knew how he’d feel, left behind in Camp James saluted. He saluted. That was that.

Off went the division, in long trains and many lorries. Camp X was nearly empty. Those left behind to hold the fort drank bitterly in the various messes, and talked bitterly about their luck.

James sat alone in Admin, with all the fans going and dust swirling about outside.

‘Darling. My darling Daphne. If you only knew how I rely on you. If I didn’t have you to think of now, with what has happened to me, then …’ And he described his situation. ‘And so I’m stuck here and the division has gone off, and my regiment. I often wonder, what was the point, all that time training in England, and then I missed the first Normandy invasion and Dunkirk, and we weren’t sent to Africa, and I might just as well have faked an excuse, my knee would have done, or gone down the coal mines. I sometimes think that would have been better. But then I wouldn’t have met you and that is what matters, the only thing that matters.’ And he repeated the refrain of his love for a page or two. Then, as always, he told her what he had been reading. ‘I found a lovely poem. Of course you must know it. It is called “Deirdre”. By James Stephens? It makes me think of you. “But there has been again no woman born/Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful/Of all the women born.” Deirdre and Daphne. And you are a queen. My Queen Daphne.’ And so he raved on for a page, then another, until it was time to go to the Officers’ Mess for dinner and the News.

Their regiment was in the thick of it, up in Manipur and Kohima. There had been casualties.

Weeks passed and back came the soldiers, not elated now, all that had left them, but they had been through it and looking at each other’s faces could see how they had all changed.

Jack Reeves was wounded and in hospital. Again James lost his friend. Sergeant Perkins would be decorated for conspicuous gallantry. A few killed. ‘Reasonable casualties for what was achieved; we threw the Japs out of India.’

But it did look as if the war was coming to a close, in Europe, at least. There would be an end. Soon. In Northern Europe it is when spring is on the horizon in the shape of longer days and earlier dawns that people subside into depression or think of suicide. Similarly now, with peace actually coming nearer every day, Camp X seethed and boiled with discontent. ‘So near and yet so far’ was the title of a poem in the camp newsletter. With the refrain, ‘So near to them, so far to us’ - them being the senior officers, who so often were to be observed taking off in Dakotas for Home. Officers and VIPs.

Donald put on Romeo and Juliet, and James was Romeo, a male part at last, astonishing everyone, and added several letters to his pile of them to Daphne, which he would post when censorship was over.