The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (39 page)

The sun set. Even the beggars had deserted us. The station lights went on, and the lights of the great decaying world. The macaque monkeys which lived in the sheds nearby and had watched our loading operations with interest were now settling for the night; they were stocky animals, agile, un-squalid, detached from their surroundings – the serviceman's final proof that India and Indians were barbarous. When the light failed, the monkeys scuttled away, we were alone in the sidings.

The Mendips were on to episodes from their life-histories now. They never pretended that living was other than a dreadful and on the whole makeshift thing, or that it couldn't be got through pretty well by anyone with a strong stomach and a sense of humour.

The captain poked his head in through our window.

‘I've just been over to the RTO and departure time has been postponed for a few hours.' Groans from us all.

‘The train will leave in the morning, as early as possible. It means you will have to sleep here. I'm sorry about that.
Corporal Dutt, arrange a guard on the train as last night, two-on, four-off, right?'

‘Yes, sir. Can those off duty sleep on the platform as last night?'

‘I think it better you should all stay here. I'm sorry there's no lighting in the carriage. I shall be over at the RTO's all night, if you need me. I have laid on
char
for ten tonight. All straightforward?'

‘Yessir!'

‘Get as much sleep as you can.'

We burst into groans and curses as he left. Furious though we were, the element of surprise was lacking. Our unanimous verdict was that such delay and inconvenience were fucking typical.

Before morning came, we were stirring, jumping down and stretching, peeing against the carriage, having an early fag, calling to the monkeys. We straggled across the railway lines to the platforms for a shit and a shave and a bite of breakfast. Half-an-hour after it was up, the sun was tickling the backs of our necks with its heat.

The breakfast served on the station meant that we saved the rations in the sack. This sack stood on the wooden bench in our compartment, next to the open window. Feather and Carter the Farter and I were strolling back towards the train after breakfast. Jock McGuffie, as it happened, was the only one actually in the compartment. He gave an agonized cry as we were approaching.

‘They fucking bastarding skiving monkeys!'

He appeared in the window brandishing a heavy machete.

We saw what had happened. The macaques had come along the roof of the train. Jock had been trying to tempt one into the compartment with a cigarette, perhaps intending to catch it. The monkeys had swarmed down – and one had grabbed two loaves of bread from our precious store.

I gave an answering yell, flung my rifle to Carter the Farter, and dashed forward. The robber-monkey was making off along the roof of the train, not going particularly fast, a loaf of bread under each arm. I jumped into the open doorway, put a foot up on the window-sill, and heaved myself on to the roof. The world looked different up there – a wider panorama of desolation.

Several monkeys were scrabbling about on the roof. They froze and looked at me reprovingly, with the scepticism reserved for an outsider. Perhaps they had their own ghastly society up there, a duplicate of the one below. I stood up and made a dash at the one who had appointed himself baker. At once, all were on the run.

It was exhilarating clonking along the carriages, jumping from one to the other, urged on by cheers from below. Some of the macaques dived to one side – off the train and on to the nearby sheds in splendid leaps. My boy ran towards the engine. He was not particularly putting himself out, and would occasionally look back over his shoulder in encouragement. He dropped one of the loaves of bread. It meant nothing to him.

He turned. He was going to jump off the train, and then he would be gone. Yelling, I gave a great leap forward. The steel on my boots skidded against a roofing stud. I slipped. He looked in astonishment at me as he sailed, loaf and all, across to a crumbling stone parapet. I was tumbling over the slope of the carriage roof, my hands out to stop myself. No luck. Over I went, head first. There were wires and messy iron things below, lying in the ash. I joined them.

They helped me back into the carriage. Someone retrieved the loaf the monkey had dropped. Feather brought me a mug of
char.
The Corp gave me a fag. Carter the Farter brought along a sweat-rag dipped in water with which I mopped at my face and hands. It felt as if I had broken my arm and both knee-caps.

‘Give him some fucking air!' Jock said. ‘The wee lad's fair laid out. Lie him down on the seat, flat out, lie him down on the seat! I've been in the same way myself many a time, and all you want's a wee bit air and a lie down and you're right again in no time! I'll kill those fucking monkeys, I will, I'll have their bloody guts for garters, I'll bite their balls off. We'll have you fighting fit again in no time, Stubbs, old laddie, dinna worry – give us a fucking fag, Corp, and let's make room for him along this fucking seat.'

‘I'd better get the captain,' Corporal Dutt said.

‘Och, there's no point in dragging that bugger in,' Jock said, with his instinctive unease at the mention of authority. ‘Mebbe I'll just have a
shufti
in at the canteen and see if they've a loaf or two going spare …'

‘What sort of a country is this,' Carter the Farter said,
‘where the monkeys runs away with your basic rations like a lot of flaming Nig-Nogs?'

‘That's where the Nig-Nogs come from, isn't it?' the Corp said. ‘It's all in Darwin – one lot come out of the other.' He glanced out of the window accusingly as if, in that heat, the evolutionary process could be taking place again at any minute.

Although I appreciated their fuss, I was in no state to enjoy it. I lay on the seat as they desired, my head on a pack and the sweat-rag on my forehead, while pain chased up and down my legs and my right arm. What a bastard!

Towards mid-day, our train finally started its long journey east towards Calcutta. The breeze was welcome. Outside, a great bowl of plain cluttered by, eroded by a million years of sunshine. For no known reason, I was asking myself how anyone could be expected to have any character in such a setting. The plain and the sun between them ground down to dust any possibility that individual lives were significant.

We had periodic glimpses of skeletal farmers immobile on the plain, grazing it with ploughs dragged by wafer-thin oxen. How could one imagine those farmers had – in any English sense – character? ‘Circumstance is more than character': where had I heard that? I was having enough trouble trying to establish my own character. Even when I got away from this terrifying land, if I ever did, it might prove impossible to forget the plain and the sun and the mental deserts they represented. What a bastard it all was!

Everything was in balance in my mind, as I drifted in a light delirium. The tent of my life had three pegs to it: my upbringing, the Army and India. The poor flapping canvas between was out of control.

Jock McGuffie was prodding me.

‘Hey, Stubby, you're making a beast of yourself with this fucking wooden seat, so-called. How about sitting up now you're feeling better and letting some of your mates rest their arses a wee bitty?'

What had I been thinking about? The daydream had gone. I shifted up a bit while the rest of them settled down to a game of pontoon.

It's beyond me to describe what Calcutta was like. I had
no adequate terms of reference for it then, nor am I sure I have now, a quarter-of-a-century later. Time-lapses are not always a help. All I see, looking back not just to Calcutta but to the time of war in the Forties, are scenes diminished by perspective – still bright, but shrunken by all the changes since. Despite myself, I'm writing history. The honest truth is, I don't remember what it was like to be Private Stubbs although I remember the things he did. It is not only times that change; human character is even less stable than we care to think, and alters out of recognition under the impact of the years, like a boxer's ear.

So all you can say about Calcutta is that it was the capital city of the impoverished world. Inside its tattered confines, hardship, suffering, and degradation were so busy that they made Victorian London seem like the City of the Blessed. The refugees from the surrounding countryside – which at that time was locked in famine – imported their particular stone-age poverty to the worn-out streets. I had written proudly inside my paybook a tag from Cicero, recalled from school: ‘
Omnia mea porto mecum
' – ‘All that I have I carry with me', but the boast wilted to nothing beside the inheritances of Indian poverty, which included malnutrition and all its associated diseases. Cholera never died in this city; it ruled in a fine state of health; Calcutta was its capital.

Before our train had crawled through miles of dispirited outskirts and dragged its length into Howrah Station, I was in a state of fascination. Nowhere, surely, could be more full of possibility, more free from the repressive judgements of home! That vibratory feeling never left me all the time I was in Calcutta. It was fantastic. Although I have spoken of it as a fortress of misery, its effect was stimulating. The brave Indians survived, flourished, in situations that would kill off Europeans.

They smile as they stand against a peeling wall, trying to sell miserable military badges, they wake in good heart after spending a night curled up in the rickshaw they pulled all the previous day. This is the capital also of man as a beast of burden – you need a licence to drag a rickshaw, and competition for one is formidable.

How can such a great machine work? Manpower alone is not the answer. Wherever man suffers, he sees to it that his womankind suffers at least as much. In the West, we have forgotten that over much of the globe women still exist in a
state of slavery, to be traded and sold, to have their bones ground and sweet bodies exploited. Calcutta is also the capital of whoredom.

All this was true and more so in the Forties, for the structure of the city was forced to support, in addition to its natural burdens, an influx of warriors of all colours, British and American in particular. Many of those warriors might be permanently broke by the standards of their own country; by Calcutta's standards, they possessed enormous purchasing power. I was drawing the equivalent of twenty-five shillings a week; it made me a rajah in that great decrepit capital.

I knew what I wanted to buy.

Perhaps my desire was less to lie with a woman than to go in pursuit, to have a destination in that gigantic maze.

Our rear detail checked into a ghastly transit camp in Howrah and prepared, each in his own way, to get the most out of the evening. McGuffie was all set for a night's drinking and pontoon-playing, as were several of the others. He was setting up a school, together with a Scot from another unit, an uncouth man called Chambers with a large thistle tattooed on his chest.

I said to Tertis, ‘Fancy a night out, Jackie?'

He shook his head. ‘I'll sit in on the card-game and get an early kip.' He still would not look me straight in the face.

‘You don't want to play with these hairy-kneed Scots or they'll have every last anna off you and leave you skint!'

‘Och away to the brothels, man!' McGuffie roared. ‘It's where ye were born and where ye'll dee!'

Calcutta was too big. I could not face it on my own. After a while, Feather agreed to join me. We spivved ourselves up, put on clean shirts, and strolled out of camp – by which time, our shirts were soaked with sweat. It was hot. My right leg and hand were hurting.

The sentry on the gate pointed us in the direction of town centre, and we headed hopefully along. Children were everywhere. In each of the blind arches under the railway bridge, whole families lived. Between permanent buildings, temporary shacks had been erected. Every house seemed to be bursting with people. The streets were full of beggars, wandering in the gutters or sitting with their backs against walls.

In such a dump, even shit had its value. Women collected animal droppings, made them into neat round pancakes, and
slapped them against walls to dry. When the pancakes were baked dry, they fell to the ground. They were collected into frail baskets, the baskets were set on the women's heads, and the women went forth to sell. And most of these people had tranquil faces.

Even the shit-wallahs were doing good business. Everyone was busy flogging something. Poor though the place was, the system supported degrees of poverty in something like a buoyant state. We saw barbers shaving men in the street, squatting in the gutter to deliver a shave like a caress, in exchange for a cup of tea. And the
char
-wallah had a similar agreement with the butcher, who slept on his slab overnight.

Even poverty had its elegant gestures. Even the
char
-wallah had his almost naked young assistant. And when this child had handed over a cup of tea to barber or butcher, the latter would drink and then – with a flick of the wrist – cast his cup down to smash into the road. The cups were made of baked clay or mud, without handles. Perhaps there were Untouchables who picked a living out of mending the broken cups!

Everywhere, frantic trading was going on – to an outsider, most of it as incomprehensible as the languages spoken, each with its special intonation. As Feather and I got nearer the centre of the city, the pace hotted up. People were less dead, being richer. The crowds grew thicker. The buildings were slightly better, their iron balconies a shade less ramshackle, but all seemed more tightly crammed with humanity who had to stand out on the balconies because the rooms behind were so stuffed with heat and children – rather like endless chests-of-drawers so full of clothes that the drawers remain open and overflowing.

All this we saw in the special embalming kind of Indian darkness, lit by countless lamps and clattering trams, which crawled along under their sagging cables, belching green sparks at every intersection. The sparks were their way of protesting against the loads they had to carry – every vehicle bore white-clad youths draped from every possible vantage point outside.