Key to the Door

CHAPTER 16

Malaya soaked under rain. Brian swore he had never known anything like it: a mountainous backbone labouring against such a punishment of water. It seemed strange that the nearby sea could take so much and, walking to the door, he almost expected to see that the waves — after each flat-handed bash at the sand — had leapt over the beach and were worrying the billet support like ferocious green dogs. Sand was hurled like pepper through the open door. “For Christ’s sake, put wood in th’ole,” shouted a telephone operator. “That stuff’ll blind me; I wain’t be able to see my dirty pictures then.”

“Belt up,” Brian called back, enjoying the grey fury of the storm. “I want to see how much longer we’ve got before tekin’ to the boats.”

“I’d feel safer if I was in one now.” Bush-hats, wellington boots and capes: a hundred yards from breakfast at the mess had forced him to change every stitch. Dampness gave the illusion of cold, and those not on watch sat around in jerseys, a thing unknown since the landing from England five months ago. He remembered a conversation with a melancholic Welsh regular at the transit camp: “The grub’s rotten out there, man. You sleep in tents, what’s more.” His long Bible-backed face wagged over the pint Brian had treated him to: “I wouldn’t go to Malaya if they paid me danger money. Terrible. Insects drive you insane. Not to mention snakes getting in your bed. No pictures, not even on the walls. And boy, you should see it in the monsoon: so much rain you drown if you slip. I’m telling you — you couldn’t go to a worse place.” The memory of the sing-song voice whose owner didn’t take himself seriously made Brian laugh: he closed the door and went back to finish his letter.

“Dear Mam,”—he looked at the envelope already addressed, ON ACTIVE SERVICE scrawled across the top, which made him laugh because the war had been over a good two years. I can’t act, and I’m nobody’s bleeding servant. I’m just on a free trip, a poor man’s Cook’s Tour to the Far East. He threw the envelope away and addressed another, writing the initials OAS in the bottom left corner where he hoped no one would see them.

“Dear Mam, thanks for the Daily Mirrors. I had a good read when I was on watch in my hut in the paddy field, where I sit sending out morse code every day. I went to Pulau Timur the other day and got drunk. I go once a month when I get paid. I go with a gang of pals, and we take a boat two miles over the water.

“I hope everything’s O.K. in Nottingham. Does Pauline come to see you? If not, why don’t you visit her? She don’t have much time with the kid, and neither of us are having much married life, me being out here. Give my love to dad. I wish he could write to me sometime, because I’d like to hear from him.” A washbowl near his foot was set to catch water from the leaking roof, and he pushed it dead under the main fall when it missed a few drops. “It’s raining at the moment,” he wrote, and rounded the letter off: “Your loving son, Brian.”

Half an hour remained before going on watch, so he lay back for a drag, staring up through his mosquito-net at the rafters and palm-leaf roof. They’d dished out the new identity cards that day, and the photo turned it into a convict passport, with details splayed to the left of it: Aircraftsman Second Class Brian Seaton, nineteen, five feet nine, medium build and blue eyes. No distinguishing marks. That’s not much of a description, but I suppose it’s the best they can do because if I was a humpbacked cripple I wouldn’t be here, would I? He took the card from his shirt pocket. What a mug! I’ve gone thinner since I came, so I’d better be careful or else I’ll sweat mysen to death. I’ve got the same mad starers as the old man, except that mine are blue and I look a bit cross-eyed on this. A good tan and hair like pig bristles. Christ, I’d better put it away.

Maybe they got a file on all of us at Base, like coppers: “I sentence you to two years’ hard service in Malaya, which is the maximum sentence the law allows. That will perhaps teach you to be eighteen and think you can get away with it. Next case.” He imagined the extended dossier:

Politics: Socialist; used to read Soviet Weekly.

Sex-life: Plenty until he fell foul of the authorities and received his two years. Five-fingered widow now.

Complexes: Mother, father, and inferiority.

Patriotism: Nil. Wants watching.

Favourite film star: Jeanne Crain.

Anything worthwhile: Good at wireless-operating and earns his six bob a day. Works sixty hours a week — so we won’t let him go yet.

Discipline: None. Even wears civvies on duty.

An argument brewed up between Hansford and Kirkby. Hansford was a brawny dark-haired southerner, a nineteen-year-old know-all halfway between callow youth and a dead-set staidness. He had an upper lip permanently curled, a disfigurement of spirit rather than a physical defect, for it accentuated all his moods. When he was happy and good-natured in the canteen, others drew around him for the hilarious fun that was bound to break; but when broody and irascible, he infected the whole billet, with the risk that the others might turn on him. This vacillation in his harelipped nature — hardly any fault of his — tended to make him unpopular more than anything. He was naked now but for a small towel lapped around, stood truculently holding soap and flannel. He’d have been out the door in five seconds, except that, nosy and intelligent, he happened to hear Pete Kirkby tell someone that he hadn’t been called up but had volunteered. Hansford fastened the towel tighter around his waist, a set disbelieving expression that was in itself an insult to the person doubted. “You didn’t volunteer,” he said with a hard drawl, implying that no one could be that barmy. “Come off it. Tell us another one.”

“I did,” Kirkby answered calmly. Brian reached for a tobacco tin to make a cigarette. His tastes in smoking varied according to mood and, often, affluence. He tried a pipe, black Chinese stoogies, ready-rolled or tailor-mades — each label signifying calm or agitation, contempt or well-being. Hansford lifted his lip of incredulity still further: “Come off it, you bloody liar.”

“Belt up,” Brian called out. “It ain’t got owt to do with yo’ whether he volunteered or not.” Kirkby was an old pal, a Radford lad from a long time back, when they’d known each other at the cardboard-factory where both had worked at fifteen. Kirkby was short and well-built, as strong as a donkey, taciturn yet now and again struck with the bright light of humour, which had flared particularly when Brian in the factory tried to indoctrinate him with his own politics. As labourers they had worked like a team, lumping sacks of flour and alum from outside lorries to inside pastebins, or hanging up trolley after trolley of wet fresh-made cardboard in the stifling heat of the drying-rooms. “I volunteered because I was fed up,” Kirkby had the patience to explain. But Brian knew it wasn’t the right way to tackle Hansford, who responded: “Christ, I’d never get that fed up.”

“Don’t worry,” Kirkby said, “I’ll be out the same time as yo’, ’cause I only cut my throat for the Duration of the Present Emergency. I’d ’ave bin called up anyway.”

Brian blew clouds of tobacco smoke over his row of shining boots, hearing the dull woollen punch of breakers on the nearby sand and the shattering bouts of rain flailing the roof — punctuating deadly boredom between watches. Che-Din, the Malay youth, worked well to keep the shine on their boots. You’d think they were his pride: two lines of glistening toe-caps along each side of the billet — though Brian imagined he hated their guts even more than he did himself, which was saying a lot. Che-Din was small, compact, and delicate, sometimes came to work in a sari and trilby hat. He once pointed out a tree at which Malays and Chinese had been shot by the Japanese, and Brian asked him whether he preferred the Japs to rule in Malaya, or the British. Che-Din shrugged and said: “What does it matter? They both make us work for nearly nothing”—a response which infuriated the unpredictable Hansford, who threw a boot that clouted his shoulder, bringing tears of shame to Che-Din’s eyes and driving him from the billet for three days. “I didn’t mean to hit him,” Hansford said by way of apology to the others, who cursed him as much for the bad luck of his accurate aim as for the impulse that led him to pick up the boot.

“I suppose you got more than you bargained for when they sent you out to this bloody pigsty?” He sat on his bed, as if to set his argument in for the evening, when Kirkby only wanted to get back to his western. Yet Kirkby was sometimes flattered when people quarrelled with him: “I enjoy it out here. I’d never ’ave seen this country if I hadn’t joined up, would I?”

Hansford wiped his crutch. “I can think of better ways to see the world than being shipped out like cattle on a troop-ship.”

“So can I, mate. I’d never earn the dough to do it, though.”

“You should sign on,” Hansford said, a dry cocksure assumption that he’d got the upper hand. “Twenty-one years would do you just right.”

Kirkby grinned. “You think I’m loony?” trying to hide irritation behind his grin, but not succeeding. “Three years never hurt anybody.” Hansford descended to the centre laneway: “The best three years of your life, don’t forget.”

“Come off it,” Brian chipped in. “Every year’s the best year of your life.”

“Not if you’re in uniform.” Hansford turned from Brian’s effort to bring the argument against him, and looked hard at Kirkby as if he’d like to hit him but wasn’t sure of the reception he’d get. Brian could have told him. He was madder than Kirkby now, and Kirkby’s grin became genuine because he’d noticed it as well. “The three are going O.K. for me,” he laughed.

“You must have a warped mind,” Hansford threw back. Others were listening, looking up from books, cigarettes, thought, or emptiness. “Not so much of the warped, Hansford,” Thompson, who was in for seven-and-five, shouted threateningly. “As long as my mind’s warped the way I want it to be,” Kirkby said, “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll be going back on the same banana boat as you, but I’m not griping all the same. I like the sun and I like swimming. I even get paid for being here. Not bad for a year or two.” Hansford could not penetrate such satisfaction: “You ought to get a job writing recruiting posters,” he said, and padded down the steps to take his shower. Brian stamped on his fag-butt with bare feet, then pulled on his wellington boots.

Quarter to six: he slung a cape over his shoulders, took up his haversack with: “See yo’ lot in the morning,” and walked into a wall of rain. He couldn’t hear himself think above the noise it made, as it spat out a gust that raced across his mouth. The covered lorry stood fifty yards away, and he climbed in the back. Singing came from a nearby billet, an antidote because so much rain was frightening, gave the impression it would never stop until the universe filled up and the world sank. Coconuts now and again fell like Big Bertha shrapnel: a quick swish as they came through branches and thumped themselves on to wet soil.

He banged against the cab and sheets of water took to the air as it made for the road. Malayan police at the gate stood under palm-leaf shelters, capes outspread under their glum heads. The lorry roared up the coast road, and all he could see were grey waves, grey clouds, and roaring mist a thousand yards out. He was glad to be leaving the camp and the apprehension that had descended with the first rain. Everything became subdued under it, all inmates on edge waiting for it to end not long enough after it had begun. Out of the crowd he felt better, freer, happy enough to whistle the latest song hit from Radio Seac. Fires, tended by women for the evening rice, burned by the native huts-on-stilts.

From the back he only saw what the lorry left behind, not what its blunt-nosed radiator was heading for — suddenly turning to pass the ramshackle control tower and race up the wet shine of the airstrip that seemed as if it were being laid like a carpet as he looked at it. He was going to the outlying DF hut set in the middle of a vast square paddy field and connected to the runway by a thin path of mud now hazed under needling rain. When the lorry stopped he leapt out, drew the cape about him, and made for the distant hut.

At the same time, the operator he was to relieve began walking towards him. The water was continually pierced with weighted rain, was churned to a murky and cancerous colour, and the earthen lifeline between runway and hut had in places been well eaten into by the force of it. Brian trod slowly to avoid slipping into the three-foot depth on either side, whistling a monotonous tune as if it would help him keep balance. Tall, fair-headed Baker came level, his myopic eyes looking superciliously through the rain, thin lips firmly closed, giving the impression that they were about to break out into a smile, though the opposite was true, for Brian knew he was browned off and dead to the wide after his afternoon grind. “Anything going on?”

“Not much.” Baker spoke tersely, his hat brim uptilted by a gust of wind. “You might as well close down at seven. A Dak coming up from Singapore should be landing in half an hour.”

“He’ll ’ave a job to land in this stuff.”

“Got to land somewhere, the poor mutt.”

“As long as he don’t flatten his snout on that runway,” Brian said. “I wun’t like to try it.” They were already fed up with each other: Brian eager to get into his isolation, Baker to escape from it, so there was no sympathy between them. They passed. On the far shore invisible hands of wind were trying to duck the heads of palm-trees into the water, bending their supple trunks that sprang back time and again in defiant protest. White flashes of lightning skidded across the water, to meet thunder out on the runway.

The hut stood on a square of ground, surrounded by four aerial poles whose wires joined above the middle of the patched and often-mended roof and went down through it into the direction-finding receiver. The smell of water and dampness was so strong that it threatened to block the nostrils, made it difficult to breathe, as if the earth were soil to its core and soaked through and through. Baker had plugged in the speaker, and atmospherics scuffled with the noise of rain by the hut door.

He went in, shedding cape, hat, and haversack, cursing Baker for an idle bastard because he had let rain drip on the accumulators. I suppose he was reading his motorbike catalogues again; the no-good worker should have been a mechanic, not a wireless operator. He struggled with the long heavy boxes on to a form, which he pulled to a dry corner, then signed on in logbook and diary, and called up Singapore to ask the strength of his signals.

The first flexible key-tapping of his nightwatch went out clear and neat, the long and short of each letter piercing his ears with birdlike music, balm to his brain, intoxicating yet sobering, like the first drink of a dipso. He wore his earphones half on and half off, so that while hearing the solid low-pitched thumps of the superheterodyne dots-and-dashes he got the clicking of the key at the same time, as a reassuring echo fed back from desk to ears. He was on his own, and in control of a radio set, had only to press a key for other lonely operators hundreds of miles away to push a hand forward and tap out a reply. Tonight their replies were all but inaudible, just as his own calls to them, he realized, were pounced on over the jungled mountain tops by saw-toothed atmospherics and torn into unrecognition. His beloved fourteen-hour stretch of isolation had begun, and despite rain battering against all sides of the small and flimsy hut, he felt good being at work, and paused from filling in the log to open a tin of cigarettes and have a smoke.

The leeward side of the hut lay open to the grey rain-filled daylight of water and low cloud. The aerial wires generated a ghostly morse of their own, soon dominated by a message from the approaching aircraft asking for a weather report. He spun the phone handle to get the met office — once, twice, three times — but the wire was dead. Must have been chewed through by water. “None available,” he told the plane, but the operator came back fast, saying they had to have one.

He stood in the doorway to observe the weather: cloud base two thousand feet, visibility a mile, wind westerly at forty knots, raining; went back and tapped it out. Not very accurate, but the operator in the plane seemed happy. He then wanted a bearing to bring him in, but the aerials must have shorted because they wouldn’t give a reliable reading. Third class, Brian sent back, so don’t rely on it. “I won’t,” said the ironic operator.

Christ, what rain. It came with frightening elemental force, as if it had an animal mentality and imagined it would win its battle against the land after one final effort. The paddy field was a lake as far as the trees, and ripples appeared, as if the DF hut were a boat on the open sea but approaching the coast. Water dripped through the roof, some splashing on to the Sten gun and ammunition. Maybe it don’t work any more: he took it outside, stood with legs apart and fired off a magazine, aiming level across the paddy field. The sharp fireworks-sound of bullets was muffled by the storm and taken harmlessly into its belly.

Soaked, he went back in the hut, stripped to the waist, and sat at the set. What a life! He’d a date with Mimi tonight, hadn’t expected to do a watch, but the corporal who was to have taken a turn had reported sick, and looked like being in dock for a couple of weeks. He called up the French operator at Saigon, using a mixture of Q signals and pidgin French: “Any planes flying around your way tonight?” Maybe he was reading a book and didn’t want to be disturbed, but he sent fast and nervous through the interference: “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” he tapped, and waited a few minutes.

Saigon came back: “My name is Henri. What’s yours?”

“Jean Valjean.”

Brian felt his mystification, repeated the name.

“How old are you?” Henri tapped out, making several mistakes. “Thirty-five,” Brian said, enjoying his game. “And you?”

“Twenty-seven.” Brian asked if he liked Saigon, and back came the wireless operator’s laugh: dah-dah-di-di-di-di-dah-dah. “Where were you born?”

Brian told him: “Nottingham.”

“Give me the address of a hot girl then.”

It was forbidden to send plain language, but Brian had never known any conscript operator that didn’t. What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo? was a rhyme he had made up, and it came into his head now. He sent out a fictitious name and address to Saigon, and they gave the wireless operator’s handshake by simultaneously pressing down on their keys.

He watched the Dakota landing: it hovered low over the palm-trees, came bouncing on to the tarmac, and hurled itself like a cannonball in the direction of the control tower. He sent out his closing-down message — good night, good night, good night — and switched off the set, leaving the ether free for the confused legions of atmospherics. Darkness closed over the water, and he fastened the doors to stop insects getting at the lights and feeding on his cold sweat. The primus flared when he tried to light it for tea, so he kicked it away and drank water with his bread and cheese.

The thought of eleven hours still to go was appalling. Lightning winked at him under the slit of door, as if mocking him because he could have been in bed with Mimi. I’m not lucky enough for this world, though it’s better to laugh than curse your luck. The wind brawled with the hut like a hooligan. God knows how I got here, I don’t. I don’t mind being cut off, but this is like clink: not even a bleddy telephone to call the control tower.

“Look,” the old man said that night when I told him I’d be eighteen in the morning, “if I catch you joining up I’ll punch your bleddy ’ead in. Mark my word.” I’d come back late after a session with Pauline on the sofa, and felt marvellous. “You don’t join up,” I told him. “In case you don’t know, they’ve been calling people up for six years.”

“Don’t be so bleddy cheeky,” he said, scowling as black as thunder, as if he’d bosh the teapot over my head, though instead he poured me a cup. “I don’t care whether or not they call you up: they didn’t get me, did they?”

“Well,” I said, “thanks for the tea, but that was because you di’n’t pass your medical, though, worn’t it?”

“’Appen so. But I swung the lead a bit as well. After all them years on the dole I swore I’d never fayt for ’em, the bleddy bastards. Not after all me and yer mam and yo’ lot ’ad ter put up wi’.” He cut me a slice of meat, all fussy in a rare bout of letting himself go in talk.

“But don’t you see, dad, they’ll call me up, because I’m fit. I wain’t be able to get out of it.”

“Dave and Colin got out on it all through the war. They beat the bleddy redcaps.” He looked vacantly towards the curtained window. “They was boggers, our Dave and Colin was.”

“They got ’em, though, di’n’t they?” I said, remembering the time with regret.

“Ah,” Seaton said, laughing, “but the war was over by then.” He took a fat swig at his tea. “So stay out on it.”

But he hadn’t wanted to keep out on it, because that would mean staying in Nottingham when he wasn’t sure he wanted to any more. Not that he was afraid to desert either, but he felt he would be more of a deserter in letting himself be called up than roaming like an outlaw around the night streets, and in fact might miss something if he didn’t let himself go for once where the wind took him. The old man went on and on:

“Our Eddie deserted in 1917, got on a bike and rode to his sister’s at Coventry. The crafty bogger didn’t go by the road for fear the coppers ’ud stop ’im; he went along the canal bank and didn’t meet a soul. It was twice as far, but it paid him in the end. She hid him for six weeks, but the loony sod missed Nottingham and came back one day, so mother and dad had to look after him. A pal saw the coppers coming to the house and towd us, so he skipped off and stayed out in Wollaton Roughs. The poor bogger nearly froze to death. I used to ride out on my bike every day with snap my mother had packed up for ’im. But one day I worn’t clever enough: the bleddy coppers follered me, right to where Eddie was hiding — and got ’im. Three months later he was in France, and a week after that he was a prisoner with the Jerries till the end of the war. We had to laugh: our Eddie was fawce bogger.” Another round of hot tea was poured in the lighted kitchen.

After a drink of water Brian groped a way to the charpoy bed and spread sheets across it. Baker had let the accumulators run too low before phoning the transmitter compound for renewals, and there wasn’t enough light left to see a shadow by. He lay on the bed, listened to rain hitting the hut like thousands of grains of rice, the water harvest of South-East Asia. What would Colin and Dave have done in my place? Packed up and gone. But they wouldn’t have got this far, and I’ve seen things they’ll never see: “Did I tell you about that time I saw a python, our Dave, when I was in Malaya? In a paddy field it wor. Must a bin twenty feet long, as thick as my thin raps and splashing about like boggery. Di’n’t waste my time watching it, though.” “Better yo’ than me,” Dave would say. “I’d rather see Tarzan at the pictures.”

Large rats were scurrying on endless journeys up and down the hut, having a pow-wow on the roof about the rotten weather, and how it had flooded them out of their nests. He couldn’t relish such company, spun the telephone handle in the hope that somehow the cable had miraculously mended itself out in the swamps. But it was dead, useless as a picked lock, and after another drink of water he lay down in a cold sweat of sleep.

Livid wounds lit up the hut and penetrated his eyelids, forcing them wide open, so that, staring at wind and thunder that sounded as if some lunatic had been set loose with matches among touch paper, the noise seemed louder than when his head was down. The sheets were quickly wet, and he wondered if water had been dropping down without his knowing it, was comforted to realize it was only his sweat. The thought of moving the bed out of rain-drips seemed to demand a too impossible effort through his fatigue.

Lightning flashed continually, as if the sky had turned itself into an enormous signalling lamp and he was lying right by it: at one time he woke and tried to read its signals but they didn’t make sense, unintelligible morse quickly erased by a follow-up of thunder.

He noticed a dull grey light in the hut, felt it before opening his eyes, as if it were a tangible thing, a ghost that rain had pushed like a letter under the door while his face was turned. He had mixed feelings about waking up, and such noise greeted him this morning that he would rather have stayed asleep. The storm had rampaged all night, still went like a full-grown battle that, though covering the whole country, seemed to centre on the paddy field and the DF hut in particular. Something else infected him with worry as he lay on his back. He shivered from the clinging touch of the cold sheet and the intense smell of mould, grew colder from a fit of coughing, so pulled his shirt on and sat up. A foot of water came nearly to bed level, covering his wellington boots and a tattered Penguin book. The flood: I’ll thumb a lift from Noah as he goes by. Roll on the boat. What can you do, O what can you do? Can it, and belt up. What a bastard, though. I’d better move. I can’t hear myself think with this thunder: I want earplugs — and an eyeshade for the lightning. Water curved from his wellingtons, which he emptied and put on. Then he paddled to the receiver and pulled down switches. He pressed the key to bring himself on frequency, which elicited a good morning from Mingaladon in Burma. “What’s good about it?” he tapped back. That stopped his gallop. It was seven o’clock.

He looked out from the leeward door of the hut. All but the far-off trees were covered, and the path across the paddy field — now a lake — leading to the higher ground of the runway was nowhere to be seen. Rain still pitched itself into agitated water, as if it would go on falling until the hut collapsed and floated away. He saw it clearly, and his first thought was to desert the hut, to wade through the paddy field and reach the runway, for in this mess the aerials were useless for bearings.

He paddled to the desk, and by some miracle got through to the control tower by field telephone, began spinning a sorry though vivid tale to the officer on duty. His description was cut short: “Close the hut then, and get back here. A lorry’ll take you to camp.” But what about a boat to get me to the runway? he thought as he slammed the receiver down so hard it almost cracked. The loony bastard.

Whistling a tune, he stuffed logbooks and ammunition into his pack, disconnected the accumulators, and lifted them to the highest point. A bloated leech, as big as a small snake, wriggled between his boots and made its way into the hut through a gap. “You wain’t find owt in there: I just got out in time,” he called after it. The hut sides were a crawling mass of spiders and other insects that had taken refuge from the rising flood, and rats squeaked in fear from the roof, running down to look at the water now and again, then hurrying back to tell the others it hadn’t gone down, might in fact come up to get them yet.

His boots found the path, two feet under the surface. A lit cigarette was soaked and blown across his face, and he spent most of the journey spitting tobacco-bits back at the wind. With the Sten gun looped over his shoulder, he waded slowly, for in some places the path had been washed away, and he floundered almost up to his armpits trying to find it again. He was sweating under the rain, afraid of meeting snakes, remembering the many he had seen and particularly the python splashing not long ago near the hut. Maybe they all swam off to the trees, was a happy though not convincing thought. He swore aloud and talked to himself. It’s an adventure right enough, and I’m as far away as I ever wanted to be, about three times farther than Abyssinia, which is sayin’ summat, but Christ, I’ll be glad to reach that runway where I can’t get bitten, and get back to camp where I can swill some tea. He pulled the cape around him to keep out the driving rain. If only the old man could see me now: “What did I tell you?” he’d say. “You daft sod, up to your neck in that rheumatic water. If you like water that much you’d a done better going for a swim in the Trent. I towd yer not to join up. They never did owt for us, so why should yo’ do owt for them? Eh?”

A mile trek along the runway was made against a spearhead of wind, and he felt his face being blown out of shape, cape flying back like Bela Lugosi, the vampire-bat man’s, hat twisted like an old gold-digger’s. Soap bubbles came from the toes of his wellingtons. He was even too fed up to worry about a plane pouring down the runway behind and flattening him. All I want now is a warm billet and a long novel, and a shovelful of grub every four hours to keep me fed. It’s an easy life, though, except when a wet sky falls on top of you.

The control tower wasn’t much better off than the DF hut. Water poured through the roof, and maps covering the walls were discoloured beyond recognition: Burma was running hell for leather into the Bay of Bengal, and French Indo-China was making a sly move against Singapore. Sumatra was going red, which gave him a laugh, though he thought it was a shame and a waste about the good maps. A large shed opposite the tower, which catapulted a firetender whenever a plane was expected to land, had been blown flat to the ground. That’ll cost ’em a bob or two to put right, he smiled. The flying-control officer gave him a few dirty looks because he was dressed in a civvy shirt instead of a uniform, but Brian smoked obliviously in the doorway, feeling the dampness getting into his marrow.

The relief lorry arrived through the mud, Baker landing in a pool of water he couldn’t have seen as it pulled up. “Is the camp still there?” Brian asked when he’d finished cursing. “Or has it bin swept away?”

Baker refused a cigarette: “We’ve got to go back to the hut and bring the accumulators out.”

“You can’t get back yet. The paddy field’s flooded.”

“The signals officer says we must.”

Brian felt as though he’d been thumped at the back of the head, red stars winking in front of his eyes. “The jumped-up bastard, what does he know about it? He wants to come out and get ’em himself instead of knocking back whisky and cornflakes in his jumped-up mess.”

Baker had been to a public school, was hidebound and full of games, mutinous only within the limits of King’s Regulations. “We have to do it anyway.”

Brian came down the steps. “Back through the slosh for a couple of mouldy accumulators.” The lorry took little over a minute to do the runway mile, and Baker was daunted to see the water so high. “Come on then,” Brian called out, already waist into it, “frightened o’ getting wet? Don’t mind the odd snake: they run away from yo’ first.”

“Balls,” Baker shouted, in with a splash. Brian waded quickly, only stopping to point out a gap in the path, feeling more courageous now that someone was with him, and he was in the lead. Still, if you had somebody shooting at you from them trees you wouldn’t even think about snakes. “The boys in the hut have been feeling sorry for you, out all night in the floods,” Baker called. The rain no longer drove like needles but splashed against the dull putty of Brian’s skin, was unfelt through his fatigue. A snake rippled on the right. “Thanks,” he shouted to Baker.

“We’re going to operate the DF frequency from the signals section while the rain lasts. Is there a gap here?”

“No, come on a bit. There, it’s not deep, though. They should a bleddy well thought o’ that yesterday.” Still, it was good: the signals section was only fifty yards from the billet: he’d be able to nip down the road and see Mimi more often. He unlocked the door of the hut, and the bloated leech swam out again. “The gale blew a tree down on to one of the bashas last night,” Baker told him. “No one was hurt, though.” They lifted the accumulators to a chair. Brian sensed he was seeing the last of the place, that no one would operate from there again. Baker thought they should bring in the auxiliary aerial and went outside to get it, but he let go as if it were electrified: spiders, leeches, centipedes, and scorpions scrabbled for the protection if offered against the flood.

“God,” he exclaimed. “Let it stay.”

I’ll be out here another year, and on that boat by next autumn. The thought gave him patience. There’s something good about being here, though, and interesting, because in a way I wouldn’t have missed it, in spite of what the old man said. After all, there worn’t any scorpions in Radford, and I’ve allus wanted to travel. But what a way to do it! Shouted at like a rag-bag all the time for not wearing a uniform. I wouldn’t be seen dead in it, though I have to put it on to get my pay.

He covered the accumulators with his cape (soaked to the skin, he didn’t need it any more) and they carried them slowly to the lorry. “Better not slip,” he said, “or you’ll get an acid-bath. Imagine gettin’ a pension for rheumatics and a scorched arse.” One foot slowly before the other, it took all his will-power not to speed up against the driving rain. “You wouldn’t be able to settle down, would you?” Baker said, happy because they were halfway across.

It seemed as if the rain would never end. A glittering sea of blue, equal sky above green hills, and the pastel colours of Muong across the straits, with red and black ships in the harbour and yellow strips of beach north of the town, seemed like a dream already, even vaguer than memories of Nottingham. On fine days it was a treat out at the hut sitting in the basket-chair stark bullock naked to get brown, while some poor aeroplane belted his morse lungs out for a bearing or met report. He’d make a fire and have sardines on toast, wearing down another tin from the endless supplies in the grub chest. Once he’d given a few tins to the Chinese rice sower who drove his ox and plough by the hut, and the man had made him feel foolish by bowing his thanks about half a dozen times. That’s the worst of doing a good turn to an ignorant bastard; he ain’t got the brains to know that everybody’s equal. Still, bowing to them’s like shaking hands with us, according to Mimi. The continuous rattle of rain was the only real thing at the moment, a cocoon of water that enveloped his brain and the whole world.

From the back of the lorry he saw the DF hut, a small dark block in the middle of a vast square lake of grey. Then it was out of sight and they were roaring down the runway as fast as an aeroplane trying to take off. Wet and hungry, he would get cleaned up and go to the canteen, drink as many bottles of Tiger Beer as he could take. In a day or two he would see Mimi. Baker prodded him: “You were going to sleep,” he said.

CHAPTER 17

Left from the main road (ignoring a notice saying: BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES) meant cutting himself off from the forceful grip of lights and traffic, and entering dark groves of palm-trees. The narrow lane was indented with cart-ruts, and trees rising on either side overlapped it with shadows. He felt a criminal every time he parted from the traffic, committed to some irrevocable step, though in fact he was only going to see Mimi. Walking, he pictured her framed beyond the darkness, behind the fireflies that now and again glittered in pairs and seemed to put out their lamps when he went too close.

Black night was a good camouflage until danger had passed and you could light up again, proving that fireflies knew a thing or two. He pictured her, the collar of a blue kimono dominating the bones of her round face, sitting maybe at her rattan table to make up before he came. Or perhaps, wearing her pyjama dress, she stared vacantly into the mirror, a mirage of green or yellow, at a small face and slow-moving, finely made hands. He couldn’t see her features clearly when she was out of his sight: the image shifted or became blurred, taunted him with having no memory. It was the same with most things. After getting back from watch and as the camp came in sight — a score of long huts clear and sharp among slim-poled palm-trees — the airstrip and DF hut he had only half an hour left were already vague and beyond description, shimmering in the open heat and the dreaminess of wide spaces. Absence makes the heart grow fonder only because memory plays you false. The strange, beyond reach whether in the past or future, was always more tasteful than what stood before your eyes, made itself even more illusive if you tried forcing your eyes like antennae into the dim corners of it. He couldn’t for instance recall certain parts of Nottingham, or old faces, no matter how much he screwed up his will to do so; yet they would come vividly when he was least trying or expecting them, so sharply that he once stopped tapping morse in the middle of an urgent message and, with an aircraft waiting at the end of his signals, was transfixed until the picture departed. Such visions made the power of his memory seem unreliable and weak.

He stopped to light a cigarette and, in the accentuated darkness left when the match went out, saw the glow from lights in the village. But the dark trees in front gave greater promise, and he walked on. He hadn’t seen Mimi for a week, which was bad enough, but worse when measured by the appetite each visit left him with. An application to the signals officer for a temporary all-night pass had been turned down because the reason for asking it had been guessed. Three dollars a day wouldn’t cover much more than a weekly visit to the Boston Lights taxi-dance hall where Mimi worked, and in any case there was a one o’clock limit to these expeditions. He was lassoed from left and right by legislation devised by some genius for persecution: permission for this, permission for that — still, what did I expect when I let them call me up? I should have told them I had an old blind mother to support and that I believed in God and Jesus Christ and all that pack of rotters. Then maybe they’d ’ave let me off. And everybody at home used to think I was clever because I read books! Christ, I knew a hundred words of French before I was able to tell my left hand from my right, and I knew the capital of Bulgaria at the same time as I learned to read the clock. Bucharest, wasn’t it?

The vision that had stopped his morse dead in its tracks was when he went to get a job at fourteen. I had to have a medical and the eye doctor said to me: “Now look at the circles on that card, son. You’ll see that the circles are broken on the left or right side. Starting from the big circle at the top, I want you to tell me what side the gap is on every circle, left or right.” What a laugh. I never felt so ignorant in all my life, though it didn’t stop me getting the job.

The track was dry, a shallow bed of powder, for the monsoon had been over some weeks and the one-season year was three quarters on to Christmas. A hand in pocket, he recognized by the motion of his legs the peculiar swaying walk of his father, though it was hardly noticeable to someone looking at him, and most of it had been eradicated by parade-ground drill in England. But it was there and gave him comfort as he walked in the darkness, accentuating his own self and setting him apart from the camp and all it stood for. A Malay in white shorts and pith-helmet came by like a phantom, and Brian said good night in the man’s own language, a reassurance to both that they were passing human beings and not ghosts. There was no reply to his greeting, and he wondered whether his Malay had been understood. He knew the days of the week and how to count, a few common words of food and drink, a verb or two, but no more. There were classes in Malay at the camp but he couldn’t bring himself to go, was unable to take the learning of it seriously, half thinking that Malay didn’t matter as French and Spanish might, and half not being bothered to master it. He had seen it was easy enough to learn: you could put words together in a string without bothering about such complications as grammar, of which he knew nothing.

The Patani swamps weren’t far off, and vegetable decay, rank and bittersweet at the same time, mingled with the smell of fish and rice being cooked on glowing charcoal fires from huts among the trees. The bungalow was across a clearing, half a dozen rooms on stilts with rotten floors, and a palm-leaf roof that leaked in rainy weather. But the feeling of it, when he was in Mimi’s room drinking tea, or lying with his head across her and his thoughts in comforting oblivion, with the smell of joss impregnated in the wood of the widow’s room and drifting through to them, was of a last refuge, an outpost of his forward-pushing consciousness that in some strange way was similar to certain patches of his life now left so far behind that he couldn’t draw them to him, let alone fit them with words.

He saw a light from the corner window: Mimi’s room. The Chinese widow who let it was on her weekly visit to Muong, and wouldn’t be back until the last ferry — which docked when Brian was to be in camp. He didn’t go up the front steps, but using his guile in case the widow hadn’t yet left, made for the back, kicking his way through the tangled garden and thinking in one panic-stricken moment that he had trodden on a snake. Maybe it’s dead, he told himself, walking along the veranda. He hoped Mimi hadn’t heard him, looked in through the unshuttered window and saw her lying on the bed wearing only the bottom half of her pyjamas, the nipples of her small pointed breasts ready to embrace the roof. She seemed to be staring blankly at nothing, but her eyes moved, and following them, he saw a lizard on the ceiling hunting insects. “Why don’t you climb in?” she said, not looking at him.

He hesitated. “You can see the lizard better from inside,” in a small persistent voice hard to disobey. He leaned his elbows on the sill and smiled: “I’m watching it from here. I’ll disturb it if I come in.” She looked a treat, with her short black hair, a round face with sallowy yet youthful skin, and heavy unmoving eyelids. Like a doll, he’d said at first, but that was for the story-books, the lucky dips of ancient Christmases, a twisted picture of geography given out at his no-good school. He remembered the first night’s dancing at the Boston Lights, talking to her and buying round after round of drinks and wanting to sleep with her, seeing her mouth well shaped by lipstick and strangely angled eyes that looked so profoundly blank in the few seconds when nothing was being said that he felt momentarily panic-stricken on realizing the distance between them both. But that was a few months back, and he knew now that there was no bigger gap between them than had separated him from Pauline at the start of their long bout of passionate courting in Nottingham over four years ago. Even here I can’t get her from my mind, though I’m married, so who can wonder at it? It plagued him like a magic lantern out of control, switching from one thing to another, Mimi to Pauline, then back to the here and now of Mimi, because it was like having the blade-point of an axe paining your lungs to dwell too much on Pauline, and the way he’d betrayed her as soon as she was out of sight.

Returning from the dance hall on that first night, having lost Mimi to her other customers, he separated from the gang he was with on the ferry and walked down to the third-class deck. A small Chinese girl in black sat with legs curled up on a form, twisting her fingers together and holding the entangled result to the light to see what she made of them. Then she got tired of this and began to cry: Brian dropped a handful of coins into her lap and she stopped, her mother wondering what it was that woke her now there was silence.

The boat was in mid-channel: Muong like a row of dying embers, while northward the smooth sea was empty for a thousand miles as far as Rangoon and the Irrawaddy. The black lifeline of the opposite shore had long since faded, but for the encrusted lights around Kota Libis pier waiting for the ferry’s touchdown. Back on the first-class deck, stepping over outstretched legs, he saw Mimi gazing at Muong from the rail. The night air was warm and she stood in her yellow dress, clutching a black handbag. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

She turned quickly: “Oh, it’s you. I’m sleepy”—and looked back at the water, as if only the ploughed-up phosphorescence of it could give rest from the vivid colours her eyes had been seeing the last five hours.

“Do you work as hard as this every night, then?” He noticed her ear-rings, small yellow lanterns whose shadows were thrown on the flesh beneath her ears by rights from above. “You get tired whether you work or not,” she informed him. He kissed her, felt the touch of cool ear-rings as he drew back. “Stop it,” she said, turning away. “I have to be wide awake with you boys.”

“Not with me,” he said; “I only want to know where you live.” It was beyond him that she hadn’t simulated anger at his kiss — though he expected the going to get harder. But she smiled: “What do you want to know for?”

“To come and see you.”

Instead of resistance, she teased him: “What for?”

He sensed that this sort of humour would never leave her, even when she was tired. It was a mask. Because of it he didn’t know whether to think she was younger, or older, wondered how an invisible listener would have seen it — then spat into the water. “Because I like talking to you, instead of always to the others in camp.” Slyness seemed as good a way to break through as any. Mimi was a giggling child one minute, much younger than him; then was in touch with a life into which he could never reach either because of age, or because she had access to depths that went off at a tangent to his own. Himself, he felt young and old in stages, knew nothing but the fact of being on the boat with her, future and past and everything else obliterated except the lights and water and wooden decks of the ferry-boat around them fastened by booze and sentiment within the prison of himself at nineteen, which didn’t help towards an easy flow of conversation.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. “So I don’t suppose you work.”

No longer smiling, she wouldn’t have a cigarette, so he lit one for himself. “I don’t,” she said.

Not caring about being persistent, he asked: “Can I see you then?”

“If you like.” She was listless, and he hardly noticed her joyless agreement in the surprise he felt at it. The fact that he was taking advantage of her came to him dimly and didn’t bother him anyway. When he didn’t look like speaking, she smiled: “Don’t you want to come?”

“Yes, course I do.” The lights of Kota Libis were large, and they saw people moving about and waiting as the boat did a half-turn ready for the approach. His spent fag dropped into the water. “Where shall I meet you?” sliding an arm around her.

“At seven, outside the photo shop. In the village.”

The lizard hadn’t moved for ten seconds. What sort of a view did it have of her, upside down on the ceiling? “This is a long game,” he said; “it can go on all night.”

“The children play it,” she said.

“Like my mother: she says she used to sit in the kitchen when she was a little girl and watch the clock hands move. It was a game that lasted hours.”

“That would bore me.”

“I like lizards as well,” he said. “Out at my DF I’ve got a pet chameleon, green on top and duck-egg blue underneath. It waddles over the floor every morning and I feed it a saucer of bread and milk. We’re pals now, in fact. He went off for a couple of days not long since, and I thought he’d got eaten by a snake, but then he came back with a female, so he must have been courting. Now I’ve got two of ’em supping at the saucer. I reckon they know when they’re on to a good skive.”

She was laughing, a sort of distrustful giggle, flattening her breasts and sitting up on the bed: “Why do you tell me such stories?” He leapt over the window-sill and sat next to her. “Because it’s good to tell stories. Anyway, that’s the on’y time you like me, i’n’t it?”

He drew her close. “You’re so funny,” she whispered. Many of her remarks seemed like meaningless counters, long since detached from inside her, with no real connection to her own self. These he imagined her having used freely to other lovers she must have had: he recognized and resented them, jealous because they stopped him getting close to her. “That’s better than having a long face all the time,” he said, “like some people I know.”

“But funny people are sadder than anybody.” It was strange to him: her old man had become a shopkeeper, she said — bone-poor, though, at first — from Canton, and he imagined him with a stick over his shoulder, like Dick Whittington, only Chinese, coming south-west in a junk chewing a plug of opium to help him on his way. He saw him as young and steel-faced, hat on his head shaped like a handleless dustbin lid, living off a handful of rice a day and shaking hands with endurance, handsome perhaps, but making a hard go of it in Singapore. The thought was terror to Brian: in Nottingham yes, but he would have died over a life like that, scraping cent by cent from kerb-stall to backstreet shop, which even now, Mimi said, wasn’t all that easy. But Mimi had been to high school, and this difference, with female and Chinese thrown in, not to mention a couple of years in age, had for some time mixed up his attitude towards her, though things between them seemed to be improving at last.

The high school hadn’t lasted long and he was touched by the sad way she had left. A boy-friend who worked for some political party (he was in no doubt as to the sort of party, using his instinct accurately nowadays as to left and right and knowing enough about Mimi) had got her pregnant at sixteen, then disappeared because the British police were after him. The Japs came soon after, and no one had seen him since. They didn’t see the British police for four years either, except in chain gangs.

She sat with legs under her, away from him. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her, but the wish deadened because of the look in her eyes. “You’re the sad one,” he said. “I suppose you get so fed up with having to laugh every night of the week that you can’t even act yourself when you’re with me.” He walked away, sat on the one chair in the room. “So I tell you funny stories to make you laugh. That’s the best way, i’n’t it?”

“Sometimes”—like a child who cannot understand what is being said to it. He said: “I knew a lump o’ wood once that joined the air force and got sent to Malaya. It was a smart and chipper piece, not a big lump of wood, about half a pit-prop, if you want to know, that parted its hair on the wrong side of its head, but still it met a lady pit-prop that spoke Chinese when she was asleep, but when she was awake she spoke slow English and said she loved him. How’s that for a good beginning?” In the teeth of everything, there was a spun-out ebullient story he couldn’t stop himself telling and acting out, as if several whiskies had already taken effect and sparked it off — except that he’d touched none. The story became another limb, crazy and uncontrollable, used without thought, a joyful rigmarole spinning words out of the night of himself. It was a bout of inspired clowning, like a flash of sheet-lightning that opens — and glows metallic and incandescent against the horizon of the mind until the story or clowning has gone.

She was laughing by the end, brought over to him by a short-circuit that avoided the separate complex depths in each of them. It was silence or laughter, and though he could find out little or nothing in face of either, he preferred to see her laughing, which meant at least a warmer welcome. She lay out flat and shook off her pyjamas, naked but for a bangle on her wrist, an oriental maja. Her fleshy nakedness was matched to the damp perspiring night, was connected in some way, he thought, looking up, with the dance of death around the moth lamp of electricity: what the dark bellies of the geckos missed, the sun captured and sizzled to death. He thought back through her nakedness to his sweetheart girl-friends of Nottingham, of how true it was that no matter how many times they had made love together he had never seen any of them completely bare of clothes (except Pauline, his wife, but she did not count), not slept the night and seen them as he saw Mimi now, talking as if her birthday suit were the latest fashion advertised in the Straits Times — something to be shown off and proud of, acquired at enough expense to justify revealing it in the flattering half-light to Brian, for whom she had a sort of love that neither could explain or yet feel compromised by. There was uncertainty as to which was more real: to go slowly through layer after layer of tormenting yet hypnotic cloth and cotton and discover the smooth whiteness with exploring fingers, or take one nakedness straight to the other or your own. It was a matter of climate and locality, a difference as much evident in his own body and brain as between two far parts of the earth: jungle with field, swamp and wooded hillocks, a sea of sharks and sting-rays, to the slow meadow-winding of Midland rivers whose banks were sometimes as heavily clothed as the girl he lay with while watching their heavy cumbersome unwilling serpentining through the winter.

“I’ll make some tea soon,” she said, returning his kisses, “and then we’ll be cooler.”

“It’d need eight pints of beer to stop my thirst, but then I’d be good for nothing!” Tea was a natural division of their meeting time, after which they made love, a ritual evolved through many visits. “When I get back to Nottingham I wain’t be able to drink the steaming mash my mother makes, with sugar and milk. I like it cold and weak now, served up in bowls.”

Her thin arms slid away from his neck: “You’ll soon get back to the English way.” He was used to the rhythm of her voice, so that, while complete sentences registered more quickly, he lost the facility for reading hidden meanings in them, accents and stresses being removed as the need for repetition waned. His dexterity at reading morse rhythms had proved a loss in that it enabled him to master Mimi’s too soon, and because her own language was Chinese, she was able to hide so much in her flat deliverance of English. “I’m not going back to England,” he said.

She seemed surprised. “Why? It’s a very nice country. That’s what it says in the Straits Times!”

“It might be, but I don’t like it.”

“Well, you’ve got to go back,” she smiled. “You promised to send me those books and things.”

He’d forgotten about that: books of sexual technique and contraception. “You know enough of that without me sending you books on it.”

“I like to read about it, though,” she said petulantly; he seemed to be going back on his word.

“All right,” he said; “but I’ve still got a year to do out here. I might even stay on longer.”

Insects were worrying her: she disentangled a sheet and drew it up. “You haven’t got a job in Malaya, so you’ve got to go back.”

“I could get work as a rubber planter. It wouldn’t take me long to learn Malaya, if I really tried.”

“What’s England like?” she asked. “Tell me about England.”

“I don’t know anything about England. But I’ll tell you about Nottingham if you tell me about the jungle. If the insects are bothering you, pull your net down.

“They’re not: they never do. If you became a rubber planter you’d be in big danger.” Neither spoke. They heard the croak of bullfrogs and crickets working their looms of noise in the deep grass outside. Dogs barked from the huts, and the surviving wail of a steamer siren from Muong harbour came, debilitated after its fight with tree shadows and avoidance of village lights. He laughed: “You sound like a gypsy giving me a warning. There’s no danger in being in Malaya.”

The bed creaked as she faced him more fully, her coal-like eyes shining with concern: “You think you’re living in a peaceful country then?”

He smiled — for the benefit of himself. It seemed peaceful enough: tigers, snakes, and a no-good climate, but what did that matter? “It’s O.K.,” he said. “Just take things in your stride, then you’ll be all right. I ain’t been in the jungle yet, but I might even do that soon. Some of us on the camp are thinking of climbing up to Gunong Barat to see what mountain jungle is really like. Uphill all the way, I suppose.” He remembered seeing Pulau Timur for the first time, an island viewed from twenty miles and six thousand feet away as the Avro 19 roared high along the coastal swamps up from Singapore. Pulau Timur was an inanimate crumple of green hills lying in bright blue sea just off the mainland, looking from so high like the plasticine relief models he used to make at school, glittering under the light-bulb of the midday sun.

The Avro closed in low over its port of Muong, climbed the wooded hills behind, and threw a shadow on empty sea to the west. Brian’s stomach didn’t turn willingly with the plane, whose belly seemed to scrape a hilltop when it turned back over the island and descended for a run-in across the two-mile straits. Down over blue water, the runway was like a glistening slice of canal, widening between trees in front. He saw sand under the water, a couple of sampans hastening out of the way, fishing traps sticking from the surface like knives ready for the plane’s belly, then a long sandy beach passed in a yellow line on either side and the engines dipped ominously. This was the moment of fear, when science seemed to desert them and silence take over. Brian looked to the left and saw a huge mountain far off to the north, its grandiose peak pointing skywards, indicating a direction that he’d never before taken note of. The isolation of it reached to something in himself, the solid independent greyness beyond heat and cold, halfway into another world that attracted him, in a few seconds, more than anything else ever had. The far side of the moon seemed as familiar as his own cousin compared to this new dimension of life glimpsed far off beyond the water and coastal swamps. Then the vision went as engines roared and the plane passed over a tarmac road along the shore where cars, lorries, and bullock carts waited for its descent, rolled by a few wooden buildings, palms, ramshackle control tower, until a bump and jerk brought it on to the runway and gave him a feeling of relief to have landed. A few evenings later he stood on the beach watching the sky above Pulau Timur, orange, yellow, green, and bloody colours streaked like a horizontal waterfall over the hills, stretching south to north and boiling away towards Siam and Burma. Palm-trees bent over the water, and night fires burned in fishing villages, pointing to the mountain he had seen from the plane. He had discovered its name: Gunong Barat — the mountain of the west — and seen its height marked on a map as four thousand feet. It stood separate from the main range of Malaya, a series of peaks and humpbacks divided by forest, filled gullies, and watercourses, culminating in one pinnacle that dominated the landscape for miles. On nights of full moon its sharp ridges stood out as if it were an island, rearing up from mangrove swamps, king of the small towns and paddy fields of the coastal plain, far more complex in structure, he saw, than had appeared in one simple glimpse from the plane window. He hoped to be able to climb it, but didn’t suppose the opportunity would ever arrive. It was twenty-four miles north of the camp, covered in thick jungle, trackless, and, he thought, probably wouldn’t be worth climbing anyway. “I don’t know what you want to go up there for,” Mimi said. “Nobody lives there.”

“How do you know? I’ve heard that right on top is a caff where they sell cream buns and coffee, run by a bloke from Yorkshire. He’s been there thirty years and don’t get much trade because everybody thinks nobody lives up there.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” she laughed. “But you don’t know what I mean. There’s going to be a lot of fighting in Malaya because people don’t like the British being here. There’ll be a war.” He knew there might, having read in newspapers of murders on rubber estates, of people being shot for mysterious reasons that the newspapers couldn’t fathom. Not long after coming up from Singapore, he asked a telephone corporal why it was still necessary to put ON ACTIVE SERVICE across all letters, and he replied that the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, supplied with arms during the war by the British, had now turned awkward and didn’t want to give them back, were in fact becoming an anti-British army because they wanted independence. “And it’ll get worse,” the corporal said, a prophet who knew everything. “There’ll be such a bloody bust-up one day, I only hope I’m not here to see it, though I suppose it’s my luck I will be.”

“Well,” Brian said lightly, “maybe I’ll just go back to England as soon as I can and take a nice safe job in some factory or other. Then I’ll be able to send you them books on sex I promised you.” He pulled the sheet gently down and caressed her. “I don’t want to go back, though. I want to stay here for keeps.”

“This isn’t any good for you. What will happen when the fighting starts? Everybody thinks that a Communist army is going to come out of the jungle and kill the British. Nobody can stop them, they think. And maybe a lot of Chinese and Malays will get killed as well.”

“I don’t know. Anyway”—half facetious and serious — “I’m a Communist, so maybe I’ll be all right.”

“You shouldn’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. You ask me to tell you something about England, don’t you?” He lit cigarettes. “The smoke’ll scare the insects away. I come from a scruffy old house in Nottingham, and before the war I remember seeing my old man crying — in tears — because he was out o’ wok and unemployed. He hadn’t worked for years, and there was never any dough and hardly enough grub in the house. The kids were better off, mind you, because they had free milk and a hot dinner every day — they had to mek sure we’d be fit for the war and to fight Communists, the sly bastards. It’s a bit better now, but why should I be against the Communists?”

“I don’t know,” she said; “but you are, aren’t you?”

“That’s what you think.”

“All the rest of the British are.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’m not. I can tell you that. I’ve got a mind of my own.” His serious mood was shattered by Mimi’s serious face, by some air bubble that broke in the bloodstream of his imagination. “So if you know any true-red Communist wants to buy a Sten gun and fifty rounds of ammunition, tell ’im I’ve got one. If he can’t afford to buy it all at once, he can pay me ten dollars a week. Or a crate of Tiger Beer now and again.”

“You’re crazy,” she laughed. “I’ve never met anyone so crazy.”

“I’m a no-good loon, and that’s why you love me, i’n’t it?” he said, kissing her mouth, neck, and breasts, pressing her scarcely perceptible nipples in a black rage of passion, a bolt of lightning forcing his hand around the back of her. She broke away and reached for a dressing-gown: “Get undressed. I’ll fetch some tea, and we can drink it in the dark.”

Silence was the melting away of a stockade that released his thoughts. They came like pictures from the past, less clear than reality, though more definite than dreams, but at the same time more tribal than thoughts, let in by a disabled present. The darker, more tangible tide of Nottingham streets and people sent tentacles to the jungled hills of Malaya, assailing him at their own select times, sometimes infecting him with the poison needle of nostalgia, though often with a whirlpool of dislike and determination never to go back there if he could help it, to let its huge sprawling mark shrink and rot in some far-off lumbered-up corner of his memory. Reactions were strong because at twenty the future did not exist: present passions were based on what had gone before, and Nottingham found it easy to jostle Malaya from his brain.

He unbuttoned his shirt, sat listlessly on the bed waiting for her to come back. Unlike in the wireless hut, he hated to be alone here — as if dangerous ghosts were waiting to spring from each corner. It was a strange room, too filled with the personality of someone and something else, a staging post through which many peoples had gone before. He smiled: well, you couldn’t blame anybody for that. It smelt of perfume and perspiration, talcum powder and musk from the outside trees, blended with a subdued odour of Patani mud and joss. His hand touched the bed where Mimi’s warm body had lain, and he lay back deeper in a foreign land than he’d ever imagined and smiled to think he hadn’t been far wrong when he swore to grandad Merton as a kid that he’d go one day to Abyssinia. I expect he’d a bin satisfied wi’ this, right enough. “The dirty young bogger,” he’d have said. “Trust ’im to get ’old of a woman as soon as ’e gets there! He’s a chip off my block, all right.”

The tray made a faint rattling along the veranda, night music muted by the soft tread of her returning bare feet — careful for splinters in the worn boards. He listened in a daze, as if the sounds concerned only some far-off neighbour of himself, was abstracted and motionless almost until she reached the door; then, still without waking, merely as if his state of abstraction had quickened, he slipped off his shorts and pulled the sheet over him, reaching for a cigarette to which the match flared as Mimi’s hand put out the light. The last sight as he lay back at ease was of the gecko shooting forward and devouring a mosquito that had been whining up to then around the room for blood. The skin behind his shoulder itched slightly, so he was sure the mosquito had had plenty, and he grinned at the thought of part of himself being twice removed in the depths of another gut, like that far-fetched tale about Jonah fast in the raps of a whale.

She set the tray on the floor, and he felt her breathing as she bent over to give him tea. “Marvellous,” he said as they drank. “I’m croacking to death.” She crouched by the bed, laying the tea aside after one sip, and putting her arm on him. “Brian, Brian,” she whispered. There was no tone in the words, and he didn’t understand them. “What’s up?” he said loudly. “You think the bullfrogs’ll get yer?” His tea had gone in one gulp. “I can’t tell what I think,” she said. “Neither can I,” he answered, disturbed because he knew he should be able to. Maybe he could, yet wouldn’t. Thinking was like swimming under water: you have to develop a knack of doing so while holding your nose so that you don’t drown. If you couldn’t think sometimes, you floated, but that was no good, for all the colours and delights of the world were often under the surface: rocks and seaweeds, watersnakes and fantastic fishes — dreams and cartwheels of the imagination. But he couldn’t swim under the water at will: mostly, when he tried, his lungs and ears seemed ready to explode, and he surfaced quickly to get out of danger. Sometimes, though, he stayed under long enough to enjoy sights and sensations, and he felt that if he concentrated on breaking over the effort and fear he would eventually be able to master it. Thought was like this, almost as impossible to master as the water, yet always drawing him as if holding out the promise that one day he would be able to descend safely into his own mind, much farther down than he was able to now.

His hand roved up and down her, along the smooth skin of a backbone that seemed well marked because he couldn’t see it. She laughed: “I’ve got you in a hurry at last.”

“I was thinking,” he said, half teasing her but keeping his hand around. “I’m always in a hurry, you know that. We’ve been ’ere hours already, and I’ve got to get back soon.”

“It’s silly,” she said, “and sad for me.” He didn’t know whether she meant it or not, but couldn’t care now because she stood up and put off her dressing-gown, and he knew them both to be enflamed and ready, feeling her hand at his groin as she lay beside him. The sensation turned him into a lion of kisses, and his past and present merged and were conquered so that there weren’t two places on the earth for him but one, united by the flames and aches that both of them were scorched with, streets and green jungle joined into one moment of now.

“You’re my love,” he said, “and this is the only way I can really understand you.” Maybe time and places were joined for her, too. “I love you, I said.” Silence between them — Mimi never spoke when they made love: words stood no chance against the orgiastic working of her limbs and body.

Both were still, as if drawing breath before the fire. Life in the trees outside was a roar over their peace, filling the room with sounds, bullfrogs mating, crickets by the thousand spinning miniature klaxons as if at some voiceless football match, and the dull and distant noise of breakers burying grey heads in the sand at all they had seen below them on their journey across the shameless sea — the common speech of the night air in Malaya.

He lifted his body and thrust forward.

CHAPTER 18

I’ve only to say I hate Nottingham, he thought with a silent ironic laugh, for all the years it’s put on me to come into my mind as clear as framed photos outside a picture-house. He was in Radford at fifteen, going to work on Easter Sunday to clean the boilers and chimney flues while the fires were out, a volunteer because double-time was paid and he was saving up for a bike. One and five an hour instead of eightpence ha’penny was corn in Egypt — or would be if you got it all the time. He left the house while the night was black, making his way along silent streets at half-past five, avoiding deadheaded lamp-posts for fear of knocking himself flat. A fine rain fell and he pulled up his coat collar, shivering at the sudden impact of water, yet happy because he hadn’t far to walk. Seaton had told him not to go in: “You don’t need the money all that much, my lad; and you’ll work hard enough when you’re older.” He recognized the onus of unnecessary overtime that Brian was going into blithely, and took on his own shoulders and into his own heart the distaste his lad should have felt but couldn’t. To Brian it seemed a step forward, to work when hardly anybody else was and win the self-esteem of double-time.

A group of over-sixteens had already done a ten-till-six night shift. Light stemmed from the door at the end of the corridor, and stars shone above the sheer windowless walls of it — one wall taller than another so that the sky looked like the jewel-studded underside of an enormous cutting blade. At his feet was a manhole with the lid off, and half the gangway was choked by piles of soot and clinker excavated from the factory bowels. So this is what we have to shift, the sight of it already making his throat dry and wanting cups of tea. He looked down into the boiler room, at a host of pipes and dials upside down over a cavernous circular door out of which, arse backward and legs kicking, came Jack Parker. His face, hands, and boiler suit were blacker than the back of dominoes, and he stood up cursing because of it. “I’m glad I don’t have to clean that lot out in there. There’s mountains of soot and it’s still ’ot yet at back.”

“I suppose the young ’uns ’ull ’ev ter do it then,” Ted Bosely the mechanic said. Brian had been told by Samson the manager not to clock in for this extra work: “It’s against the Factory Act, seeing as you aren’t sixteen yet,” Bosely said, “so keep it quiet.” He walked through the shadowless cellars, between huge rolls of paper stacked almost to the sprinkler valves. What a fire there’d be if this lot went up, he thought, warmed by the image of it. There’d be no black-out then. ’Appen the Jerries’ll get it one night, though I suppose the raids wain’t start any more. A nub-end might do it, and if it did I’ll bet it’d tek more than the sprinklers to put it out. Parker was taking off his beret as he went into the stoke-hole, revealing a springy mop of flaming auburn hair. “Your turn now,” he said, seeing Brian.

“It ain’t six yet,” Brian answered, watching his rights. Nevertheless he took the spade. On either side of the furnace mouth were two flue holes about a foot square, the left one going parallel with the furnace, then rounding the back and emerging to the right of it. “I’ve shovelled a good bit from the front,” Parker said, taking out a pocket mirror: “Christ, I look like a bleeding collier.”

“Aye,” Bosely said, also ready to go off, “they’ll ’ev yer in the pit yet.”

Just after six Brian looked into the stoke-hole flue but could see nothing, then got on his knees and pushed himself in to the waist, to find it black and suffocatingly warm. With one heave he was right in and flat on his stomach, taking care to drag the shovel and keep it by for when he needed to begin excavations. He wriggled forward over brick flooring, intrigued at the lugubrious new world he had pitched into. It was black and tight around him, all sounds blocked from the outside. He lay still, astonished, pleased in a way that he’d been allowed to stumble into this fabulous mechanism of the industrial world, unwilling to start work before revelling a moment in it. It was warm, and frightening if he thought too much, but he went on a few feet until reaching drifts of hot dust piled almost to the top bricks. It was impossible to stay there, and he went on for as far as he could go, his body and face almost immersed in the powder, nose eyes ears filled with it. He tried to turn round, and the discovery that he couldn’t in the confined space sent a spear of panic through him. Dust kicked up by movement stopped his breath and he lay as if dead in his endless coffin, yet breathing quickly so as to make the least ferment. He had been out of school more than a year and this was his second job, so he regarded himself as an experienced member of the labour market, a man of the factory world already, smoking and passing himself off for eighteen in pubs where the waiters turned a blind eye; also he was courting what girl he could get hold of, and had been in a fight last Saturday so he wasn’t going to be beaten by a bit of tubercular soot.

Lying still, his apprehension went. I’ll just drop out for a breather, then get stuck in proper. He had to move because the bricks were too warm for much hugging. It’s hot and I’m smothercating, though I suppose there’s worse things at sea. The impression was of a coffin with lid on tight but minus head and foot, and having to work in the dark set him thinking of coal mines and pit ponies, and the fact that he would go crackers if he didn’t get out and prove he wasn’t buried a thousand feet underground. Jean Valjean traipsing through the sewers was better off than this, though I expect Edmond Dantès in his tunnels didn’t feel too good either. He gripped a handful of soot, hoping it would solidify, but it fell like the fine sand of an eggtimer through his opened fingers. If I had to do this to escape from prison I wouldn’t give a bogger, would get crackin’ and work my balls off, be out in no time, but as for the slave-driving penny-pinching poxetten getts of this flyblown factory — I’ll do as I like; and if they don’t like it they can whistle, because they wain’t be able to see me for a start. Knees and hands were burning, so he pushed backwards until his feet hung in mid-air and light over his shoulder told him he was in the clear breath of the open cellar.

The bulbs dazzled him. “That was a quick look round,” Mr. Wheatcroft said. “You was only in two minutes.”

“It felt like a bleeding year.” Brian rubbed hands and knees, batted soot from his clothes, wanted to look at his face but couldn’t see a mirror anywhere. “I’ll get back now, though, and dig a bit out.”

“That’s a good lad,” Wheatcroft said. “Don’t stay in too long at a time or you might conk out on us. I’ll set Bill Eddison starting from the other side. You’ll soon ’ave it done between yer.”

Per’aps, Brian said to himself, back into the black soot of the tunnel. “Don’t volunteer for owt,” the old man had told him time and time again, but he’d never taken notice of him, though his common sense should have said that anything needing to be volunteered for was sure to land you smack into the clutches of hardship. “Don’t join owt, not even a Christmas club, not two pieces of effing string.” And Brian realized, from the deep passion of experience ringing in the old man’s words, that he couldn’t but be right. The trouble was, though, that you joined or volunteered even before you knew you were going to do so. A trait you knew nothing about and certainly could never trust lurked within, waiting for a weak moment when somebody asked you to volunteer or join, and then before you knew where you were, you were fighting for breath like now in the Black Hole of Calcutta, shovelling soot for all you were worth at seventeen pence an hour. Sweat flowed out of him. This is how you get TB, he thought, by breathing black dust like this for hour after hour. I’m cracking already.

He devised a system: dragged a load of soot, shovel by shovel from in front, then (having found a doubling-up technique after many try-outs) turned himself to face the isolated mound and push it bit by bit to the opening. Then back to the soot-face to part off another load. I’ll get an X-ray next week, he thought. He’d been asked by Jim Skelton to go with him for one weeks ago, but hadn’t been able to make up his mind. He knew he was afraid, and wasn’t shy of admitting it, but now thought he ought to go because of the double doses of fine dust already causing him to cough for half a minute at a time. If I’ve got it I’ve got it, and if I ain’t I ain’t. You’ve only got to die once. It was a disease he’d been afraid of all his life because everybody seemed to die of it, even more than war. Aunt Lydia’s bloke Tom had kicked the bucket, eaten to a shadow by it. Less to feed maybe, but it was a bleddy shame. Mrs. Coutts died of it as well, and so had a good many more whose names he’d forgotten. It was a disease he was yellow of, just as he’d been frightened of being blown up when bombs were falling a year or so back. So I’ll keep that X-ray date with Jim Skelton and see where I stand.

He worked his way up the tunnel. Soot was lukewarm on top but scorched his hands and knees when he scooped down to the bricks. He’d retreat a few feet until his hands cooled, then go forward to make a few more rapid sweeps with his shovel. Why am I going like a bleddy mad-head? he asked himself. To get it finished, he answered, pushing another load out of the opening. He’d been eight months at Robinson’s cardboard factory: a tall building blackened with age and the odours of sweated labour in the middle of a long street of two-up and two-down houses. At first he was an odd-job lad, lifting, carrying, running errands, and sweeping up. He clocked in at eight every morning, and for a few weeks was set helping the charwoman during the first hour to clean the offices. This was a light and leisurely job, something that helped the morning go quicker in that he didn’t begin real work in the factory till nine. Tea-break at ten, and before he knew where he was, he was clocking out at one and running home for dinner. Each director of the firm had his office, and in Mr. Rawson’s was a huge war-map of Europe, well coloured and of sufficient scale to show the names even of small towns recaptured by the Russians — each one announced by Moscow to the accompaniment of ten salvos from three hundred and twenty-odd guns, and repeated on the nine o’clock evening news by the BBC. Solnetchnogorsk, Volokolamsk, Kalach, Ordzhonekidzegrad, Debaltzevo, Barvenkovo, Tagonrog — names of steel and defence in depth, signifying disaster for the Germans on a scale that even they couldn’t comprehend, brute force triumphing this time on the right side and smashing inch by inch towards the belly-button of Berlin. In full black flower, the Germans had gone goose-stepping into the land where all factories and property were owned by the people, and had made it grim and awful with starvation and suffering, a country which would one day become the promised land of the earth, where bread would be free and men would work only four hours a day.

The very name Russia Russia Russia touched Brian like a root-word (even before he knew it meant much more than a country) and gave him an understanding of its invincibility, so that when he first heard that Germany had gone into Russia he was glad because the war had started to end. Meanwhile the German image was rampaging: a giant figure with buck-shot teeth and a crossbow face, piked hands and hatchet feet, gun-metal eyes and barbed-wire hair, a sandbag forehead and armoured body — yet reeling now, bleeding from Stalingrad and Moscow, smashed everywhere by the Red Army, the returning hordes of the working man washing in like broad rivers of retribution, making for the big-shot Nazi rats of Germany. He laughed, buried in the black hole of Robinson’s factory, pushing soot under his belly and back towards his feet like the dead dust of burned-up Germans.

At home he had his own maps of the Russian front, not so grand and durable as Mr. Rawson’s, yet sufficient for him to mark by pencil the sinuous band of scorched earth and death. It was a game, listening for the latest towns to fall and changing the front accordingly. If the Soviet line of advance bulged too far west between Bryansk and Kharkov he knew that the Germans along the Donets farther south would be cut off unless they skedaddled quick. There were few newspapers at home, and at the beginning of the invasion he had difficulty in equating the place-names given on the wireless with their written forms on the map. He’d searched hours before finding one particular locality, had pored over the map with his cousin Bert — who was also taken with the war game set loose by Hitler. The difficult name ended the uphill climb of comprehension, for after this had been marked and mastered, every other two came easy. The six syllables at normal announcer’s speed went too swiftly into Brian’s ear, sounded like a saw going into wood: BYELAYATSERKOV. Battles raged around it for days, until the noise of it sunk in: BYELAYATSERKOV. Bert helped him look for it, a word joining their thoughts and difficult to forget after so much repetition, a holy grail searched for within a vast circle of Kiev. Bert spotted it first.

Mr. Rawson’s map held a series of red-headed pins marking the Russian front, and Brian, on the first morning of his office-cleaning, saw they were too far east, hadn’t been moved for a week or two. Maybe Rawson had lost interest; it certainly wasn’t because he was too hard-working to shift them, for he was one of the younger and less hard-driving directors, a man about thirty-five, with a squat face and ginger hair matted back, a good-natured man, it was assumed, since if he passed when you weren’t working he didn’t tell you off about it. He wore a big pair of spectacles above his heavy moustache, was a safely married man in no danger of being called up for the forces because his work at Robinson’s was said to be of national importance. Some held this freedom from the army against him, saying he should be fighting even though he was a relation of big boss Robinson himself, but one or two of the old sweats said he was doing well to keep out of it, and good luck to him.

Brian swept his office, emptied the wastepaper basket, dusted the Remington (after typing out his name and putting a few paperclips in his pocket), then studied Rawson’s map of Russia, offended that the pins had been neglected for so long. The front still led from Leningrad through Moscow to Stalingrad and into the Caucasus, whereas vast areas had passed again within bounds of the Red Army. A crippling thought came to him: maybe Rawson had only been interested in the farthest limit of the German advance, and couldn’t bring himself to rejoice over land recaptured by the Soviet forces. He laughed and in a frenzy — it was five minutes to nine — began moving pins to their rightful places, and before he took his brushes and rags and tins of polish back to the cleaning woman the Russian front was fixed in accurate positions once more.

He felt better, from then on made a more thorough job of cleaning the office, and of moving the pins each morning to their rightful places as fresh towns were captured. One day he didn’t resist the temptation to write in pencil SECOND FRONT NOW on the bottom margin of the map. A lark, he told himself. I’ll see’f he notices it, find out whether he’s altogether fed up with his toy pins or not. Maybe I’d better rub it off, though: some blokes don’t like the Russians; either that or they’re fussy about people writing on their posh maps. Yet he left it on, for somehow he’d hoped for recognition, a sign perhaps, a few words at least, from Mr. Rawson, saying that he was knowledgeable and clever at being able to find the complicated names of Russian towns and in plotting the front line with such vivid accuracy. Who else out of the two hundred working at the factory could have done it? No one as far as he knew, and that was a fact. You’d have thought old Rawson would have come along and said: “You’re a bit of a hand at the maps, Seaton. We s’ll have to see if we can’t find you a job in the office one of these days.” But they don’t do things like that. And what can you do if they don’t? You can’t go up to him and say: “Eh, Mr. Rawson, have yo’ seen what I’ve done to your map? I thought it was a shame, it being such a good ’un and the pins in all the wrong places.” In one way he might think it a bit of a cheek, me taking his game over without saying a dicky-bird, though on the other hand he can’t be offended if he don’t even see what I’ve done, and neither in that case can he offer me a job in the office. Not that I want one anyway, because you’d have to wear a suit and a clean shirt every day, and where would I get the dough to find owt like that? Mam wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d rather stick in the factory and rough it with the rest of the lads.

By dinner-time he’d cleared soot from the first half of the left-hand flue. The length behind was now too long to push the soot out with his shovel so he went in with a couple of deep pans, and when both were filled he dragged them to the opening. Near the far turning behind the stoke-hole, soot drifts went up as far as the ceiling, and the heat was fierce under him. Sweat became mud on his face, ran to his mouth to be blown away when it chafed, or wiped if he had a free hand. He rested after every six pans, curled up on his side like an experienced collier, craved a cigarette or a mug of tea. Accustomed to the work and heat, confined space and lack of air, he grew to like his temporary double-pay job. There was a feeling of toughness, even danger to it, and if his mother or aunt Ada or grandad Merton could have seen him now they would have said: “It can’t be good for him, in that hot tunnel. Still, he’s a hard worker so it wain’t do him much harm.” Also it was good to be on his own where no gaffer could see how much shovelling he did — though for one thing he was doing a good share of work, and for another, he grinned, burying his spade again in the soot, they wouldn’t dream of coming up here to see how I was getting on.

Most of the foremen and chargehands had been at Robinson’s anything from twenty to forty years, for the firm had a fixed reputation in the neighbourhood: if you get a job there, even though the pay would shame any union into calling out a strike, you could be sure of being kept on for as long as you worked like a slave and touched your cap to the gaffers every time you passed. It was one of those firms that had a tradition of benevolence behind it, meaning hard work and little pay to the right sort of people — those who would serve the firm through their thick and your thin. And before the war, when men were scrabbling for work, those at Robinson’s were careful not to give offence to the gaffers and get pitched on to the dole, even though it would have meant a mere few bob a week less, with no work or arse-kissing or danger of getting sacked into the bargain. Wage rates at Robinson’s had been carefully regulated — set at a fraction above the dole money, enough to give the incentive of a regular job, but hardly enough to keep its employees far from a harrowing exercise in near starvation. Brian laughed to think of it. Thank God there was a war on: I can allus go somewhere else if they try to come the hard gaffer with me, though I’m not much of a lad at swapping jobs and would rather stay at one place a couple of years to get my hand in and make a few pals. I can’t understand people being here forty years — worse than a life sentence — especially when they can get better money at other places. And what do they end up wi’ if they plod on here for that long? A cup o’ cocoa, a copy of the Bible, and a five-bob pocket-watch to time out the days of idleness left to them. Not even that, though: I’m making it up. They’re lucky to get a thank you, and become hot and bothered with gratitude if they do, or only spit the smell of thank you out when it’s too late to do much else about it, such as drop a nub-end on a heap of paraffin rags, or trip one of the gaffers into a manhole. It’s too late then, no matter how they feel. Earlier on they thought they’d got a trade and wouldn’t turn to labouring — put up with blood-tubs telling ’em what to do as if they was skivvies. But forty years is a lifetime, a waste of breathing in which you could have lived in every country in the world, seen everything, done everything, instead of staying a cap-touching loon in Robinson’s rat-warren.

Talking to Bob Thorpe the other day, I said that old Robinson was a Bible-backed slave-driver, a two-faced twisting dead-head who’d sell his grandmother wholesale if they came more than two at a time. Old Thorpe said I shouldn’t talk like that, and had better not let Robinson or any of the other gaffers hear it. “What would happen if they did?” I asked, laughing to myself. “Why,” he said, an almost terrified look on his long face, “you’d get the sack.” He’s a pasty little bloke of sixty. “That’d be terrible,” I said. “I’d have to get another job, wouldn’t I?” Then he brightened up and said: “You won’t be so cocky after the war, when jobs is hard to get again.” “Don’t bother,” I said, quick off the mark. “Old Fatguts with the big cigar will be out when the war’s over, on his neck with the rest of his government. It wain’t be the same again. Them days is over.” At least they’d better be. Yet nobody could be sure, and neither was Brian, despite the look of dead certainty on his face; for he dreaded the return of his father’s means-test fate on himself. I’ll shoot myself first, he thought. No, better shoot the other bastards, then maybe it’ll alter before I do it to myself.

After three months’ general work at Robinson’s, the foreman set him on as a paste-boy, mixing water and flour into brown paste at the bins, a sprinkling of alum added as the whole mass came to the boil. He carried hundredweight sacks of flour from a nearby stack and poured it in from the encrusted wooden rim of the bin. There was only one thing to compare the stench to: and his spit at the end of a day’s work was coloured orange. A plug under the bin could be released by a lever from the rolling-room in the cellar where the cardboard was made. When both vats were full he would stand in the spare minutes at the top of the steps and watch the three or four sheets of paper being drawn into the set of old-fashioned trundling rollers. Bob Thorpe was in charge of the whole operation, a master cardboard-maker who had been thirty years with these same machines, an old bald bachelor, gentle and quiet-spoken, said to read books, only ferocious when enough paste from the bins in heaven above wasn’t available to feed his beloved and all-powerful rollers. Then a cornered gleam would come in his eyes and fear of the sack would make him shout to Brian all the filthy words under the sun. Brian cursed back, though set to making more paste. The rollers ran only two days a week, and it was pandemonium in the cellars and around the pastebins, the antiquated machinery jangling and shaking the cellar roof, and even the ceiling of the department above that. Brian became strong in carrying sacks and mixing paste, felt his body and muscles hardening so that what had been almost intolerable burdens were now easily tackled. The heavier the work, the more he revelled, drew both physical and spiritual elation from it, going home in the evening tired and dead to the wide on the surface, yet feeling alive and glowing with a sort of interior energy that kept him vivid and active for his long walks with Pauline in the fields and woods.

For the rest of the week he transported trolleys of wet cardboard up on the hoist to the steam-heated drying-rooms at the top of the factory; hanging the sheets to dry with a row of other boys, then wheeling them back to the presses, and from there to the cutting-room; finally to the women packers, and stacking the bales for railway vans to take away. There was often a time lag when the last wet sheets were finally clipped up and weren’t yet dry, a recognized perk that allowed the boys on the job to lounge around until the boards were crisp and so razor-sharp at the ragged edges that they had to be careful not to slice their fingers in taking them down. It was a pleasant relaxed greenhouse atmosphere that reigned, the half-dozen of them sprawled on the warm and dusty floorboards talking or reading comics, far above the drone of traffic and engines working below, left in the heaven of the factory that Brian — from the black flues of the boiler-room — realized was the opposite of constriction and soot.

Now and again in his underground burrow he put down his spade for no reason and stared open-eyed, unseeing, at the darkness, too aware of the roof an inch or so above his head, and the wall on either side nudging at his elbows. The sensation that it was getting smaller struck him like a knife across the eyes: he lay flat on his belly and drew his arms in, stiff and silent to create the illusion of more space around, slowing his blood by an act of will, whistling a made-up tune in the hope that the theme music from a recent film he’d been trying to remember all day would come back to him. When bored with being calm, he resumed work. Sometimes the attack was too quick, and he was in a panic before any control was possible, so he wriggled back to the opening with the speed of a snake, fell out on to the stoke-room floor, and stood five minutes for a breather and smoke, laughing at the shock he had given the others. He spent much spare time in the drying-rooms teaching Bill Eddison map-reading. Sixteen-year-old Bill was a corporal in the Army Cadets who had been promised a third stripe when he passed his Cert A examination. He was a strong, forceful, bull-like youth, quick on the draw with wit when talking about jazz and women, but dense on such mathematical subjects as cartography. He played knick-knacks to accompany his dirty songs, jumping up and down to the ballad of “Eskimo Nell” or swinging away to a neatly worded march of Sousa.

When not courting with Pauline, Brian would go on the pick-up with Bill, starting off of a Sunday night in the fourpenny gods of the flea-pit Grand, watching a show of some trash film until bored even with the ironic loud laughter at the old-fashioned style of it; then they’d sneak farther up and find a couple of girls to slide their arms around. Sometimes the girls were out for a thrill as well and they’d soon be locked in mouth-to-mouth combat from which no quarter was given. It was the kind of sport Brian liked, and he often tried to go the whole way while still on the back row so that even Bill Eddison was shocked. One night Brian had a girl’s blouse undone and her breasts exposed to his roaming hands, and was bending her so far over the seat that a little girl to the left became more fascinated than at the movements on the screen and asked, in a bright enquiring voice: “Mam, what’s that man doing to that woman?” Bill prodded him, piqued at not getting half so far with his girl. “Let’s get cracking before you get thrown out.” At which the four of them clattered off for fish and chips before the usherette came back with the manager.

Mostly, though, Brian spent his evenings with Pauline. They liked going out with each other, and she had come to him the first time out of the dark back seats of the Savoy picture-house: when the cheap war film was winding to a shindig finish and all interest had gone (Why didn’t the hero, who you knew would live, get killed? And why didn’t those who had death in their sad eyes live?), he turned and saw her, isolated among seats, face set on the screen, quietly looking at it, though without the intent fastening he often felt in his own gaze. He moved over, a lone wolf tonight, sat by her side and talked. “I can’t stick pictures like these: they give me a gut-ache.” After a pause she said: “Why do you come, then?” “Cause I thought it’d be good.” “Well, now you know, don’t you?” At least she was talking: a good start. “I do an’ all. I wain’t come again, thou, unless yo’ do. There’s a better film on next week: a musical. Kay Kaiser and his band.” “I like Harry James best.” “I do sometimes. That big trumpet makes me feel as if I’ve got frogs in my tab-’ole, though.” “Wash ’em out, and then it wouldn’t, would it?” His arm was around the shoulder of her seat. “I’ll walk home with you, if you like,” he said. “I’ve got somebody,” she told him. While “God Save the King” played, they made for the exit, and a youth came down the aisle and took Pauline’s arm. “Lay off, mate,” Brian said. “I’m seeing her home.” “That’s what yo’ think,” the youth said. “That’s what I know,” Brian told him. There was some disappointment in him at the girl’s not coming over to his side, though he grinned at the fact that they didn’t even know each other’s names. So why should she? He had one arm, and the other was taken by the tall youth, who looked brawnier than the picture he carried of himself in the wallet of his heart, though that might have been because of his heavy dark overcoat and the white muffler around his neck. Brian thought he knew him from some factory or other.

The black-out blinded him. She didn’t try to shake the youth off, nor get rid of Brian, but walked calmly between them both, as if knowing that it would resolve itself somehow and that when she ended up with only one of them, she’d then decide whether or not she wanted him. I suppose I should scram, Brian thought. If they are courting, I ought to leave them alone. They might even be engaged, for all I know. His instinct was to undertake himself into the darkest part of the black-out. Maybe they’re childhood sweethearts and I’m breaking it all up. But he kept a grip on her arm (later they were able to laugh over it), his mind blank with stubbornness, walking with her and the youth across the dark main road and into a quiet street.

The youth pulled them to a violent stop, and Brian was treated to a blood-red oil-gusher spouting before his eyes, a multicolour flash that made him let go of Pauline and stagger backwards to a chapel wall, roaring at the shock. The blow carried the seed of retaliation; he swung his fist against the youth’s head, clenched fingers ringing with pain as if he had struck concrete or iron. Pauline stood in the middle of the road like a shadow, waiting for one or the other, and Brian decided it would be him, his mind changing to not-so-sure as he wheeled again into the wall from a strong thump in his chest. He gasped, realized that it was no play-acting, that this was a total fight from which there was no running away. He lost his nerve and drove wild, made to the left of the youth as if to give the impression of cunning, feeling for some weak spot in his perimeter before returning a blow. With head down he charged, under the fists and coming up too close to be struck, gripping him around the waist and pulling tight, knowing his strength would be able to bend him down double and drop him to the kerb. Both hands locked, he squeezed inwards, the youth’s arms fastened safe, Brian’s chin grinding his chest bones, working the strongest pitch of a sack-carrying strength into his adversary — until the youth gave way and dropped. Brian let go, unable to control the dead weight of him, but the youth was up before he could sink his boots for the grapefruit crush. Brian kept close, and after a quiet grunting scuffle he found a head under his arm. In a split second he saw what had come about, tightened the vice of his arm muscles, held the head and beat his other folded hand unmercifully into it, thankful for such good luck — as the pain from the youth’s first blows began burning his own face.

The youth kicked and struggled. Brian was gone, sent beyond the world and into a dream of primeval vicious light. “Stop it,” Pauline cried. “Stop it.” The words came to him, and his fist, liquid running over the stone of it, held still. “Yo’ ’ed enough?” he demanded, releasing the head. The youth groaned and fell.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s beat it.” She took his arm and they walked off. “You needn’t a done that,” she said angrily. “He’d a gone in two minutes, I’m sure.” She slung his arm from her.

“You weren’t courting?” he said.

“Course we worn’t. He’d only been sitting with me a minute before you came. He asked me if he could tek me home, and I never answered him.” Brian kept quiet, and she said no more for a while, for which he was glad because he felt tears on his cheeks. He wanted to walk away and never see her again, to bury the shame he felt. A dark wave swamped him, but he needed even more to stay near her, to feel her close because the pain in his heart would then be less. It would tear him apart if he went on his own into the darkness. He kept telling himself to go back and see if the youth was O.K., yet at every genuine agonizing demand he was getting farther away. “I suppose he’s all right?”

“I expect so,” she said, taking his arm again. Blood flowed through his pains, an evening on spec at the pictures had ended like this, and he was glad to have fought for this girl, whom he hadn’t yet seen in full daylight, and won. “What’s your name, duck?” he asked, pulling her to him in a kiss. A car droned by, lights dim towards town. “Pauline,” she said. When he got home and dipped his hands into a bowl of water, the water turned pink. Next morning his face was no sight for sore eyes.

In the drying-rooms Brian would pick up a reject piece of cardboard and test Bill on conventional signs, grid references, scales, and representative fractions, and on how to allow for magnetic variation in true and compass north. The board would become a mass of complex symbols, Chinese to anyone who didn’t know what they meant, and Brian also taught him how to make a profile plan from a line across contours, explaining glibly the difference between vertical interval and horizontal equivalents. His knowledge had come from a manual of map-reading discovered one Saturday afternoon in the bookshop down town. He had studied the book passionately for a few weeks, but had forgotten it when his involvement with Pauline began, until Bill had blurted out one morning that he was having a hell of a bleddy time studying for Cert A because he couldn’t make head nor tail of maps.

Bill also had volunteered for the double-time of flue-cleaning, but Brian, now working late into the afternoon and having cleared almost one whole side of the stoke-hold (fed up and dead to the wide, choked with soot and sweating like a pig), suspected he’d been set on an easier job, such as standing in the fresh air of the yard and hauling soot-buckets up on the rope, ready for the lorry. Or maybe not. He’d heard the gaffer say he was to help on the right-hand flue later because they hoped to finish it that day so’s the stoker could light up straight away. If Bill’s shirked, though, he’ll get no more map-reading out o’ me, the jump-up card. What a pal, though he’s a bleddy sight better for a bloke than the no-good gaffers. All they want is higher production and more money in their pockets. They can afford to be patriotic; so would I be. Rawson’s supposed to be the best of ’em, but even he’s a bastard: Brian had lost his soft first hour of a morning because Rawson had seen and presumably disliked the words SECOND FRONT NOW along the bottom of his office map, Brian being told by the cleaning woman that another boy had been sent in from the factory to take his place. Which is all the thanks and appreciation I get for moving his pins to the proper places.

He swallowed a mouthful of dust and kept going, almost at the turning where he hoped to meet Bill Eddison coming up the other side. He was bitterly tired, as if someone or something were pressing cotton wool on to his eyelids, and the temptation to put down his shovel and go to sleep was hard to resist: it was the sort of acrid tiredness that afflicted him most afternoons with a softening of the limbs, a combat to keep his half-closed eyes from completely shutting off the active world. Usually it carried itself on with too much colour in the revealing glare of light or sun for him finally to ignore it, but now pitch darkness was allied to warmth and the soft breath-catching atmosphere of dust that he automatically shovelled into the shallow pan between his legs, and the natural urge was to curl up to the odorous bank of soft soot and say goodbye to the conscious world of his thoughts. But though the undermining desire was there, the words were not, and his fight against the desire gave the words no chance to break through. His simplified existence was kept in balance by the renewed swinging of his spade, its dig soundless when soot lay high, softer than butter to go through, like skimming the top of velvet. The noise was satisfying when bricks were reached, a muffled scooping of the steel blade along them. In some places near the back the soot had solidified into small porous balls, and here it was hottest, an intolerable climax of his flue-cleaning day.

He did a belly-crawl away from the front line every few minutes and lay on his back until hands and knees had cooled, then he rolled over and went forward again. I’ll bet there aren’t things much worse at sea. You might die quick there in a storm by drowning, but here you could easily snuff it by inches, of consumption — though God knows I can’t say which is worse: a life on the treadmill or to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Thank God I don’t have to take my pick. A shovel’s all I need, so’s I can dig myself out of a grave as well as into it like I’ve done today, or look like doing if I’m lucky and get cracking faster than I’m doing now. It’s no good staying here too long, buried like a corpse in the dusty guts of Robinson’s old factory, shovelling the gold of my heart out for all I know, hour after bleeding hour where I can’t see a thing — though I expect I’d make a good collier. Even though I’m not small, I’m getting practice sticking a thing like this, so if I’m lucky I’ll get to be a Bevin Boy instead of being sent to fight the Germans, though I’d rather do neither but go my own way to Kingdom Come.

He was working faster than he’d done all day, driven by some inner motor to a higher speed instead of slackening off, slicing the spade into the last few feet of soot to be cleared, scooping it into the pans, and using the flat of his hand as a sweeping brush to gather into a heap what the spade was too clumsy to reach.

The day had gone: he hadn’t seen it get light and wouldn’t see it get dark. I’d go off my loaf if it was like this every day. It occurred to him that he was working too fast, heart racing and throat bone-dry, arms aching too much to control. Why? he wondered. What for? he asked himself. Come on, can you tell me that? Why are you going so mad-headed? Why don’t you take your sweat, you barmy bleeder? He had already stopped, pushed back the pans, and lay full length, a blissful going like a pint of thick mild into his limbs. What’s the point of going so hard? If you don’t finish today, you’ll finish tomorrow.

But he wanted to get out of the earth, to see daylight and smell fresh air, to walk in the wind-thumped streets even if only to see the odd star above dark rooftops, to be out, away, a thousand miles off. He opened his eyes: “I’ll leave this putrid firm. I’ll get my release and go somewhere else, even if I have to bike five miles there and back every day. I’ve had enough of this, one way or another.” The thought made him happy and his spade scooped at the wall of soot. Between lying half-asleep and a refreshed burst of action, his mind had been blank; he wasn’t aware of thinking about getting back to work or making a decision — but a spark of life had exploded in his limbs and he was going forward even faster, ripping away the obstacle to he didn’t know where.

A spade that didn’t belong to him flew past his face and chipped a piece out of the brickwork, and suddenly Bill Eddison’s voice bellowed a foot away from the blackness in front: “Well, if it ain’t owd Brian! We’ve finished the bleeding thing at last.” They threw their arms around each other, and went on laughing in their victory.

CHAPTER 19

Alone in the camp library, a mug of tea at his elbow just left by the char-wallah, he unrolled an outline survey map of Pulau Timur. A fresh batch of radio operators had been flown up from Singapore, and fourteen days’ leave at Muka holiday camp had at last been handed out to him. He felt fresh after a shower, not yet sweat-soaked from the uprisen sun, dressed in immaculate white shirt and shorts brought back by the Chinese dhobi woman an hour since: his finger traced the coast up from Muong and stopped at Muka — a palm-lined bay facing Gunong Barat across the few miles of flat, variously marked blues of the water. Between swigs of tea his eyes roamed the map: printed in 1940, he noticed, a time for history books — over the hill and far away, an iceberg melted by the ever-turning suns of time, a year he remembered vividly as the date when his cousins Colin and Dave one by one went into the army and one by one, after a few weeks, came out again. He watched them return when everybody else seemed to be going, a strange thing, though underneath his quiet curiosity at their khaki uniforms draped over a chair-back like the skin-trophy of some animal was a profound and unquestionable certainty that they were doing something right and good. Ada helped them, and so did the rest, for both climate and tradition were right for it. Out of a dozen able-bodied men in all remotely connected branches of the family, only two went into the army and stayed, and one was killed in Tunisia. “I told you so,” was the verdict of the rest, who either deserted or found their way into some sort of reserved occupation. It must be a record, Brian thought, for one family. Nobody can say we didn’t do our bit for freedom; though what I’m doing here I don’t know — except that there isn’t a war on.

His world and everybody else’s had changed since then, and it had been about time, though his life at the moment seemed like an island set aside from the main coastline of his well-trod continent. Malaya was an interlude, he felt, and he was set out in the blue, like the song that had been sweeping and saturating the country for the past six months: “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” records of it being played in the cafes, whistled, sung, let forth like opium from wireless sets. On Radio Malaya’s request programme it was called for by dozens of people, Malays, Chinese, British, week by week, an inundation of names so that eventually the announcer didn’t bother to read the list but just let the sugary music fill out over the country. For weeks also Brian hadn’t been able to cut it from his mind. One minute he liked the tune, then hated it, but whistled it unknowingly as he crossed the airstrip every morning, walking from the control tower with waterbottle and haversack swinging against his thighs, crossing the burning runway into the scrub-waste of the other side — out, it seemed, into the middle of nowhere, with the blue horizon burning all round.

But in the emptiness a square patch of ground had been cleared and set off for a new DF hut, and it was his work to help two mechanics unpack a straddle of enormous crates and fit hut sides, roof, and aerials into position. The three of them laboured all day in the sun, stripped to the waist and burned brown. The new hut would be a luxury box compared to the old one, set on dry ground and fed by electricity through a half-buried cable alongside a new track that would take lorries right up to the door. The station when finished and fully rigged would be operated day and night, a twenty-four-hour watch whether planes were up or not — though Brian knew that no one would give a sod about a nod or two of sleep at the deepest pitch of the morning. For weeks there had been talk of building a new DF hut, and now, out of the weak-willed climate, one had arrived and was being knit together by plan and numbers as if it were a Meccano set. A new PBX had been set up as well, and several radar devices installed in the runway. There was even talk of replacing the antique control tower by an indestructible skyscraper. The airstrip was being tarted up for a night out — as if for a war or something, Brian thought, a cramp in his guts at the idea of it. Everyone was busier on the camp also, giving it an alien breath of being there for some purpose, which it hadn’t possessed when he first arrived. He noticed it caught in the increased rush at meal-times, in the latrines when in a hurry for a shower before dashing off to see Mimi, in the signals section when more channels were being worked than ever before, or in the new smartness of those who worked in the long headquarters hut. Sometimes you’d think a bloody war was already on, except that he felt the main combat as yet to be between himself and the threat of discipline emanating from HQ. The shift workers of the signals section were the last to be touched by it: they were excused all parades and guard duties, allowed in late for meals on production of a chit, which any enterprising wireless operator could take from the signals officer’s drawer and sign himself. If the orderly officer came through the billet late in the morning and wanted to know why he was dead to the world and tight-rolled in his sheet, he grunted from under his net that he’d been on watch the night before — so that the OO walked on, a bit quieter, if anything. The seven months’ hard studying for a sparks badge certainly paid off.

It was a simple map, and easy to memorize. He sat back in a wooden armchair to drink his tea, and wait in peace until the lorry drew up at eleven to take a gang of them across to the island. A fortnight’s leave had been something to anticipate and when that was over he could look forward to operating the new DF hut, and then something else would turn up, and finally he would find himself on the boat chopping the blue waves back to England. Time went faster when there were agreeable events to hope for — when they arrived you noticed that the intervening weeks or months had been killed mercilessly stone-dead, hadn’t even the value in memory of the sloughed-off dried skin of a snake.

Already “Roll on the Boat” had become a catch-phrase of liberation: if capable of flying an Auster or Tiger Moth, he would have sky-written it above the sloping greenback of Pulau Timur — but contented himself with sending it by morse during what seemed the empty hours of his nightwatch, only to hear the initials ROTB throatily repeated from some half-asleep operator at Karachi or Mingaladon, a quartet trail of four-letter symbols piped out of electrical contacts by a heart-guided but distant hand. Locked fast in the Devil’s Island of conscription, everyone wanted to go home, to drop gun, spanner, morse key, pen, or cookhouse spatula, and bat like boggery to the nearest blue-lined troopship. Inconspicuous chalk marks behind their beds digited the months already served, as well as giving the current demob group ready for release, and after a while the figures looked to him like some magical transposition of formulae for exploding the atoms that held their prison bars in place.

He held himself from the gala of hope and speculation, living too much in the present to imagine going back to Nottingham. Not that hooks didn’t exist to draw him there, for he had been married to Pauline nearly a year before leaving England, and she had a kid of his to keep her company while he was away. On the other hand, he had spent no more than a few weeks with her, and there had been no real married life between them yet. She was no great letter-writer, and a year apart was too long a time to keep the ropes fast around him. He was unable to make chalk marks at the back of his bed, though he knew to a day that ten months of his time abroad were still to be somehow gone through, and that to exhibit these future scars called for a waste of energy and spirit that he couldn’t bring himself to spare so easily.

He grew turbulent and black, ready to smash down the peace of this long hut walled up with books because he didn’t know the reason for it. The sound of lorries lassoing the MT section with noise, and gangs passing by to the NAAFT, didn’t draw him out of it. “That’s wonderful, Brian,” Mimi said when he told her of his fourteen days’ leave. “You haven’t had a holiday since you came.” He wondered why she was so happy: she’ll miss me, after all, as well as me missing her. Yet his suspicions never lasted long, and her response reassured him, gentle and concerned as she lay on the bed and leaned over to kiss him. A blind urge to contrariness took hold of him, a hatred of the death-like placidity that seemed to lurk at the heart of her, and without waiting for the kisses he sat up and pulled her down, pressing the immobility of her mouth against his own to kill the passion in himself in an effort to get at hers.

She drew back, seeing all, he thought, yet giving nothing. “I’ll be away for three bloody weeks,” he shouted. “Are you bothered or aren’t you?”—immediately regretting the explosion of his big mouth. This wasn’t the way to go on, her silence and eyes were telling him. What is, then? Christ Almighty, what is? He had to be satisfied with the act of love alone, and it wasn’t enough.

“I’m sad as well, Brian.” Her smooth nakedness rubbed against him, dispelled the stabs of his deeper gloom. “I wish you weren’t going.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t. It’s good for you to have a rest. You need it. You work too hard, much harder than the others.” Maybe she’s right: them fourteen-hour stretches are driving me round the double bend and halfway up the fucking zigzags, though on the other hand it’s nothing at all when you come to think on it. “They run a bus from Muka,” he grinned. “I’ll be able to see you every night at the Boston Lights — if you can spare me a dance.”

“Yes,” she said vaguely, unanswering, a neutrality he would never be able to break down — though he’d never stop trying. She placed her hand in his groin, but he was stone-cold, and his black mood returned, filling him with an impulse to smash her for trying a trick like that. “You got a better idea, then?” he asked roughly.

Her hand pulled away. “Come and see me if you like.” An endless tape, he thought, that wants snipping with scissors, then maybe it’ll finish and begin to give off the real thing. A wind roughed-up the treetops outside, a nervous agitation that completed nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his shirt. “Don’t bleeding-well put yoursen out, will yer? If yer don’t want me to come, say so.” She gripped him tight, her lips between his shoulder blades before his shirt could swing into place. “I’ve got a better idea.”

“I don’t give a sod.”

“I’ll come out and see you at Muka. We can find a lonely spot on the beach for a picnic. I’ll take the morning ferry and then the bus. How do you like that?”

A blinding flash caught her in the face, knocked her against the wall. When the knife fell deeply enough between them, all was well. Her small fists struck back, and they were holding each other on the bed, buried under a tree of kisses while the wind moaned outside.

He walked to the billet for his pack. Pete Kirkby and Baker were due out on the same lorry. Baker was a Londoner (his old man a Stock Exchange fluctuator who had made a small fortune), tall with steel-grey eyes, short-sighted under rimless spectacles, fair hair shorn to a crewcut. “Any sign of the lorry yet?” Kirkby asked.

“It’s on the airstrip running races with its shadow to pass the time away,” Brian said. Baker fell back on his charpoy, worn out after a night on watch: “All I want is sleep. I’m browned off with sending morse night after night.”

“I was up as well,” Kirkby said, stuffing trunks and slippers into his pack; “took a thousand-group message from some whoring slob at Singapore at four this morning. It was wicked. The bloke there was too shagged to send and I was too wanked to get it. I nearly went up the pole. We didn’t finish till six: two solid hours. If this leave hadn’t come I’d have fastened myself to a transmitter and switched the power on.”

Baker gathered his aeromodel plans and stowed a supply of balsa strips into his case, hoping to finish a new design in time for a competition. As he looked through the open doors, there was a glaze over his eyes that had gone beyond fatigue, a puzzling stare such as might precede a fit of madness and set him running into the breakers for a longer sleep than he really needed. He was undisturbed by a fly that crawled over his knee. Brian felt he had been miscast as a wireless operator: his morse lacked rhythm, leapt from his key-contacts in a way that jangled the ears of operators trying to receive it several hundred miles away. He disliked the discipline of radio procedure, possibly because he’d had too much of similar endurances at the minor public school he often boasted of having been to. He was contemptuous of wireless operating, saying that if you had a natural sense of split-timing and a parrot-sized memory to hold all the rules and pages of Q-signs, then you had reached the limits of your job — which as far as he was concerned made it work for inferior minds since it gave a satisfaction too complete to be valuable or exhilarating. His passion was for a deeper form of life, engines, motorbicycles, model aeroplanes, something unpredictable in motion and performance to be made out of bits and pieces. According to his story, he had been a madman on the dirt-track in England, splitting the silence of Surrey back-lanes on Sunday afternoons with an equally daredevil girl riding pillion and screaming into his ear for him to do a ton. His low forehead, aquiline nose, and thin straight lips gave an impression of a supercilious pride that often drew anger when others in the billet suspected it might be justified, though the haughty look was little more than a mask of control over fires of recklessness burning underneath.

Kirkby folded a wad of redbacks into his wallet, and they went out to the lorry. Baker wore a bright green floral shirt open at the chest and flapping down over Betty Grable shorts, a Christmas tree of cameras and luggage. They sat fifteen minutes on the open back, raging against the dilatory driver who’d vanished behind the cookhouse. “We’ll miss the ferry if he ain’t careful,” Kirkby groused. “We could a made our own way and bin over at Muka hours ago.” Baker launched into a bout of singing in response to Brian’s remark that Muka would be paradise without a squeak of morse for fourteen days.

He reached into his pack for a white trilby, which he bashed into shape and put on. “For Christ’s sake, stop your row,” came a shout from a nearby billet. “I’m trying to get my head down.”

“Belt up,” Baker railed, “and get some overseas time in. You pink-kneed ponce.”

“Bugger off,” the voice called back, a little wearier for not having the blazing sun overhead or such a well-developed string of hackles as Baker. “I’ve been out here five years.”

“Tell me another,” Baker shouted. “I was in Baghdad before you were in your dad’s bag.”

“Witty bastard”—but he said no more. Baker had been quiet and withdrawn on his arrival at radio school back in England, still unsocial even after eight weeks’ squarebashing. Now his silence seemed to have become a ruse, Brian thought, a tactic of breeding employed when he was pitched into a bunch of noisy strangers whose language he hardly understood. But he could now harangue and barney like an old sailor when he chose to. The door slammed and wheels skidded in the dust, rolled towards the guard-room. Brian sat down for a smoke, and a big pack landed at his feet, then a small pack and waterbottle, a bush hat without badges, two tins of cigarettes, and a couple of Penguin books. While the owner of these belongings began to climb aboard, Brian read a title: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and wondered what it could be about.

“Grab hold of that lot and give me a pull up.” The lorry gathered speed, and he was trotting behind. Brian and Eric Baker shot out their hands, tugged until the late arrival’s body had more weight over the backboard than towards the ground, when he fell safely into his possessions and sat on the wooden plank to open a tin of cigarettes. “I hope this is the gharry for Muka,” he said, handing them around.

“It is,” Brian told him, accepting. “Thanks a lot”—shielding a light towards his face. “You got fourteen days as well?”

“Just about. I’m posted here when I get back. I came up on a plane from Changi this morning. You three in signals?” He’d be medium in height, Brian saw, bull-like and stocky, and about thirty-five years old. He covered the tufts of his bald head by the bush hat that had landed over Brian’s shoe like a hoop-la ring at a fair, wore a pair of khaki slacks, service mosquito boots into which went the bottoms of his trousers, and a white-drill five-dollar shirt — the cheapest possible way to be out of uniform, in fact. His rolled-up sleeves showed thick hair, and a chest of it at the open neck of his shirt. On his left arm was tattooed a naked woman. A regular, Brian deduced. Must have been in ten years, and with a tan like that he ain’t new to Malaya, either. He had a face about to turn florid, red at the cheeks despite his tan, a heavy moustache streaked with grey, and light brown eyes suggesting that he once had sandy hair. Yet beneath all this was an air of youthfulness still, of intelligent and simple living that Brian had noticed in other regulars who existed in a closed world and were easygoing until they became NCO’s. (He suspected that the one opposite was, yet couldn’t be sure, and felt uneasy because of it. Should he address him as Tosh, or not?) He had a narrowness of purpose and a broad humour which came from having no cares in the world — though outside in a civilian street and suit they seemed to be going through life in a dream.

The lorry roared through the village, its swift rush drying sweat patches on every shirt. “I’m in signals as well,” he said when Kirkby answered him, “so I suppose I’ll be working with you lot when I get back. Knotman’s my name, Corporal Knotman to the CO but Len to you lot. I don’t believe in discipline and bullshit, stripes or no stripes.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Baker said. “Where will you be working?”

“Telephone exchange. I was a wireless op once in aircrew, but I lost my stripes when they found they’d got too many of us. They wanted to put me peeling spuds in the cookhouse, but I ended up as a telephonist-erk, a regular in the good old FBI.”

Kirkby took to him: “What’s the FBI?” he grinned.

“Freebooters’ Institute. Federation of British Imperialists. Footsore, Ballsed-up, and Inked-out of your fucking paybook. Ten bob a day and all found, including the crabs. I’m dead beat,” he said. “I was up at four this morning.”

“That makes two of us,” Baker put in. Knotman pulled a bottle of Chinese rice-spirit from his pack. “Have some of this. It won’t rot your guts. It’s best whisky, but I carry it in this hooch bottle so that I don’t have to offer it to bastards I don’t like. They think I’m doing them a favour, in fact, when I don’t push it their way, and that makes them begin to like me. But by then it’s too late.” Brian took a swig, so did Kirkby. Baker decided to wait a while. “Too late by then, Shag,” Knotman said. “Always take what’s going and you won’t go far wrong. You might have a heart attack in five minutes and be crippled for life. I was weaned on loot.”

“Where you from?” Brian asked, detecting some peculiarity of accent.

“Canada, but I’ve been in Limey-land eight years, so I reckon I’m the same as you now.” He stuffed the bottle in his bag and sang in a gruff but tuneful voice, as they sped along between palm-trees and beach until Brian, Pete, and even Baker joined in. It was difficult to tell whether Knotman was drunk or just whacked-out — though it might have been a mixture of both plus an armature of back-logged work unwinding in his brain. They followed his words and caught on to fresh verses, roaring loud as the lorry entered Kota Libis and turned in at the pier gates, where turbaned customs officials stopped looking into bags and cases to see what the wind had brought in.

Brian stood by the rail to watch green water tracking towards Muong. Three large junks, heavy with flour sacks and rubber, headed in the same direction, huge patched sails so slow in the water that they seemed not to be moving at all and reminded him of a poem he’d read a few days since about seeing old ships sail like swans asleep. They were like that, he thought, though at the same time resembling swans that had been in a fight and were creeping inch by inch towards the safety of a harbour. Knotman stayed on the lorry, head in hands for a while, then stared back at the long mainland line of beach as if uninterested in where he was going.

The boat went between anchored ships with such smooth precision that it seemed to be on train tracks placed invisibly under the water. As it slid towards the pier, Brian heaved himself back on to the lorry. Knotman was alive again, sat with beefy arms folded looking at Malays and Chinese going up the gangways with bundles and baskets. “Christ,” Baker said, “they’re like flies. Thousands of them.”

Knotman’s face lost its expression of sleep: “Ever been on the London subway at eight in the morning? This is as graceful as a Covent Garden ballet compared to that.” Cars packed on deck slowly unwound and the lorry drove cautiously along the pier, headed through the town, and took to a wide ramparted boulevard leading by villas on to the coast road. All were bareheaded for fear their hats would blow across the beach and out to sea. The town gone, a series of blue bays stretched beyond. When one was left behind, the driver rode his vehicle up the dividing spur before another, and from the short tarmac stretch at the top could be seen other bays and spurs still to be crossed. Then the lorry slid into the steep bay-gully immediately in front, and at the bottom was a sheaf of sand between two heaps of rock, with palm-trees along the banks of a stream. A Chinese family sunbathed by a bungalow, and on the beach children fled from each other into the water. The blade of sea broadened, narrowed to a saw-edge because of tree trunks, disappeared, and the lorry was upward climbing again. “Marvellous,” Knotman said, passing his bottle around. “Let’s drink to it. Anybody who won’t is dead from the neck up. Why didn’t you tell me Pulau Timur was this good-looking?”

“I couldn’t get a word in edgeways,” Brian said, handing the bottle to Baker. Marvellous, and he didn’t need Knotman to tell him because he’d allus thought so. Who or whatever made this must have had good eyes, wielding his brush over such bays and washing broad streaks of sea around them; and a giant fist to punch the land so that hills came up from oblivion, the same hand throwing jewels along the valleys that turned into temples. Ships sailed from the old kingdom of Barat and anchored in the streets between island and mainland, and a town grew up on the neck of land that was sheltered. Such permanent and colourful scenery, the full depth and meaning of its long life in comparison to his own, the warmth lavished on it by the sky, and the smaller lives he knew to exist in every branch and grass blade that made up the greenery and in the blue that denoted the sea, made him think of death and dying. Overwhelming beauty brought overwhelming sorrow. He stared before him, seeing the hills and ocean no longer — only the sentence that had fled from somewhere for refuge in his own mind.

Muka was twelve miles from town, several cream-coloured two-storied buildings set a hundred feet above the rocks and beach. “There was nothing like this in Kenya,” Knotman said.

“How long were you there?” Brian asked. They were directed to an upper storey in the central block.

“Couple of years.”

“You bin in the jungle?”

“I went hunting once.”

“Bag anything?” Baker enquired.

“Yes: my big toe and a group-captain. Nothing living, though. This looks like it.” They climbed the concrete stairway: “If you slip on this after a few bottles of Tiger Beer, you’ll break your legs.” They had a billet to themselves, and a Chinese to do their laundry for a dollar a week, as well as someone to make their beds, clean shoes, and bring in morning tea for another dollar. These deals settled, they ambled down the rocky path for a swim.

Brian ran into the sea, as if out of the death of the land, to save himself in forests of salt water dragging grittily over his face, falling into it at fifty yards free and releasing his weight against the water until he became a log and felt sand on the bottom scratching along his shoulder blades and spine. It was as far away from morse code as it was possible to get, water pressing milk-warm and forceful even at the palms of his hands and trying to get in, so that he hit the surface near to bursting and opened his mouth, burned by the sun that had waited to grip his hair plastered flat and hard. Eyes still closed, he made a guess as to whether he was turned towards sea or land. If I’m facing land, Mimi will come and see me. If I’m looking out to sea, she’ll give me the go-by. He stared at the black sails of a loaded junk entering the straits a mile from the beach, and before he had time to speculate further, Baker made a dive at his legs and took him under. Brian lashed out with fists and surfaced, getting Baker round the waist and pressing him off balance, chin into stream, until his adversary’s weight fell from his grasp. Brian held him down, but soon he was up again, fists pounding the malleable surface.

Less than a dozen were at the camp, leaving a free beach most of the time, and good service in the dining-room. “The lap of luxury,” Brian said to Knotman, who threw back a Penguin book by way of reply: “Read this while you’re here.”

On the second afternoon those in the camp set off for a swim in a mountain pool on the other side of the island. Brian stood up on the lorry, between an urn of lemonade and a box of sandwiches. A long band of yellow beach ran along the northern shore of the island, ending in the jungled prominence of Telebong Head light. Brian searched out some secluded spot in case Mimi should visit him as promised, though he became pessimistic about it as soon as he saw a cove beyond the farthest village, an ideal place, with a few rocks on either side and palms set behind.

The lorry climbed steeply beyond Telok Bahang, away from the sea and up a looped road with hillside falling hundreds of feet down to the valley. Clusters of huts lay in clearings by a stream snaking through bushes and speckles of sun. A Chinese woman was gathering wood: she was toothless and bald, her face brown and sexless with age, and she straightened her doubled back to smile as the lorry passed. Brian waved, felt the pendulum of his spirit move between desperate unfulfilled answers and happiness.

The hill blocking their view fell away at the road’s next bend, so that before and below was a vista of paddy fields, a sheet of bright dazzling green stretched taut, dotted here and there with the brown patch of a village. A flat plain rolling beyond to the darker green of mangrove swamps ended in a blue haze at the sea-horizon. This also brought happiness, for paddy fields meant people working for food, though the vision of it quickly faded as the lorry changed gear and began to descend.

Halfway towards the plain it pulled into the road-side, where a stream came under a wooden bridge from up the mountain and quarrelled between rocks on its way to the fields. Brian dropped from the lorry, followed the stream up course, and reached a large clean pool held in by a horseshoe of cliff, silver fishes turning under its cool surface. The watershed towered two thousand feet above, and the stream came down through forest and gully, making an entrance into the pool where he was standing. Isolation, until the others came shouting in behind, shooting their naked bodies into the pool, which was quickly filled.

George, a warrant officer up from KL for seven days, also came into their billet. He’d not long since been SWO at Kota Libis, so Brian already knew him as a man who must have reached his rank merely by having been in the air force thirty years — certainly not by bullying or ambitious bum-crawling. He was more like the harmless, kindly, nondescript bird-fancier at a branchline ticket-office that British pictures like to show as the typical workingman than the usual sort of sergeant-major. Nothing bothered him, and he was so innocuous he didn’t even possess a sense of humour — having enlisted to avoid the trivial worries of civilian life, or maybe he had just drifted into uniform with no design whatever. He obviously carried out his routine admin duties with some efficiency, though at Kota Libis he was little in evidence as warrant officer, sitting day after day in his office reading an Edgar Wallace with as much wide-eyed intent as Brian remembered his uncle Doddoe used to scan the racing paper, though in the latter case with narrowed eyes and for only a fraction of the time because Doddoe had somewhat more work to do. “What does it matter how you live as long as you live in reasonable comfort?” George said one day, taking his socks off before going down to the beach. “I’ve got fair pay, grub, clothes, and a bed to sleep in. In return I do some work (only a little, though, he winked) and lose my independence. You can’t have it fairer than that, can you, lad?” He filled the bowl of his large pipe with such complacency that Brian felt like kicking his teeth in. He’s dead, the dead bastard, the brainless old bleeder. He’s a natural-born slave. “It don’t sound a good life to me,” he said. “Maybe not,” George answered, unruffled at what Brian saw as the greatest insult, “but I chose it, didn’t I?” Some people ’ud choose prison if they could get a cup of tea, he thought. George was of medium height, bald and pot-bellied and spindly-legged, wore bathing trunks and resembled a white ant grown to a man. He took up his towel and went out, leaving Brian to read. Christ, he thought, he’s been in this mob thirty years, and I’m only just twenty. I hope I’m not as dead as he is in thirty years. I wonder if Len Knotman will end up like that? Though I don’t suppose so because his time’s up in a year, and then he says he’s getting the hell out of it back to Canada, where he can get a job up north and be a free man again. “I’ve learnt to know what freedom means in these last eight years,” Knotman had said to him. “And the bloke who doesn’t learn that, sooner or later, isn’t fit to be on the face of the earth, because they’re the types that end up as the enemies and persecutors of those who know what freedom means.”

At five o’clock he lay on the beach, a coolness coming invisibly in from greying sea. Baker waded in from a swim, maddened by horseflies spotted on to his legs like currants, skeins of blood running from each as they chewed his flesh by the mouthful, having hovered in wait by the water’s edge. “They’re like flying leeches,” Knotman said. “Ever had a leech on you?” He lay against the rocks, having swum himself out for the day, bush hat on the back of his head though the sun was well down behind the island. “No, I ain’t,” Brian answered, slinging a fag over.

They smoked in silence. Gunong Barat lay to the north, a black aggressive monolith coming out of the mainland twenty-odd miles across the water. Brian wanted to ascend through its wet forests (leeches or no leeches, snakes or tigers or elephants — it didn’t matter), to test his strength on its steep incorrigible slopes. Hard labour would be needed, but the claws of endurance would goad him on, turn him into a treadmill of effort as he struggled up. This revelation grew indistinct and gave way to grandiose speculation as to what it would be like to use the distant encircling vision of its eyes from four thousand feet. “I’ve thought a long time about trying to climb that mountain over there.”

“What’s to stop you?” Knotman said lazily.

“Nothing, I suppose. It wouldn’t be easy, though. A bloke in the billet came down from Burma the other day and flew over it: he said it’s up to its neck in thick jungle.”

“It would be an experience,” Knotman said. “You can’t leave Malaya and not know what the jungle’s like.”

“What is it like?” Brian asked.

He laughed: “Like a woman maybe — deep, dark, and hard to know. Dangerous as well, if you don’t watch your step.”

“It might not seem like that to me,” Brian said, having already told Knotman he was married and seeing no reason to switch the subject so abruptly.

“It did to me. I had eight years solitary — meaning one woman. Then I got out quick.”

“I was talking about Gunong Barat, though. Why does it have to be like anything?”

“Because it does. Otherwise it’s got no meaning. And everything means something.”

“All right,” Brian said. “I give in. What does Gunong Barat mean?”

“You mean what does wanting to climb it mean? I read once that you only climb mountains when you’ve got no ambition, but think you might as well get something out of life. Of course it’s different with you: you’re just an idealist, meaning you give in to worldly values without dirtying your hands on them.”

“So what? Can’t you do it just because you want to?”

“If you like. I expect you can buy a map in Muong. They’ve got everything taped there. Then you can see what you’ll have to cover to get to the top. Can you read a map?”

“Sure.”

“Ask for a week’s leave then and shin up. Get Baker and Kirkby to go with you.” The mainland was darker, a solid lowdown horizon more important than the distant skyline of the mountains because it was close and immediate. “Start thinking about it seriously,” Knotman went on, now encouraging where before he had been diffident. “The three of you should be able to do it as easily as going for a swim — or taking a pull of whisky.” He passed the bottle: “A sundowner?”

Knotman was not the wild impulsive drinker he had seemed at first, his boozing having enough method to be a helpful and enjoyable habit. The impression bossed Brian that Knotman had developed, through the jungle of years and circumstance, a sort of calm and order into his existence, a compromise between strange perplexity and wakeful eyes, whereas Brian at the moment saw life as something you bashed into without thought or consideration either for others or for yourself, because he had neither the time nor the intelligence to manage things better. Everybody’s different from each other, he thought, and I know for a fact I ain’t got the wisdom of Knotman. I wonder whether I’ll be cleverer, though, by the time I’m his age?

Between bouts of swimming, after a fight with the swell of the tide — near to panic on the last hundred yards to his depth — Brian sat on the beach and, joined by Baker, built castles in the sand. Each structure was enclosed by a complex zigzag of exterior moats, and endless tunnels led from one system to another beneath the medieval story-book designs. They sat with the patience and built-in delight of children, creating edifices out of sand, using skill to keep lines angular and embankments firm. Before climbing back for tiffin at midday they would watch the tide come in, its advance-guard of foam creeping nearer by the inch to the outer wall of fortifications. The first wall crumbled like bread, Brian feeling a quiet I-told-you-so satisfaction at the unalterable laws of the slow war of attrition between earth and water. Artifice made the contest more exciting: tunnels built out to the water led under the highest towers, so that they collapsed while the tide was still some feet away, a subtle fuse of destruction that gave great delight when it worked cleanly.

Mimi came to see him once during his leave. He hadn’t expected her at all, had given her up with bitter disappointment because his holiday was nearly at an end, so that she appeared almost as a disturbance in the calm atmosphere of Muka. But when he saw her standing by the gate in a blue flowered dress, a yellow parasol on her shoulder, holding a straw picnic bag in one hand and waving to him with the other, it was as if excitement punched him under the heart: suddenly filling the gaps of what was an obviously thin existence when she wasn’t nearby.

They shook hands, laughing because such stilted formality made it seem as if they hadn’t seen each other for years. “You didn’t expect me, did you?”

“Too true, I didn’t. I nearly gave up hope — which means I’m glad to see you.” She explained how late she’d been sleeping after long and heavy nights at the Boston, her serious face more placid than when she sat unspeaking. They stopped at a stall in the village to buy bottles of beer, plantains, and oranges. An old Malay passed, driving a bullock cart loaded with coconut husks; he wore sari and sandals, and brown ribs at his chest stuck out like a lesson in anatomical engineering. Brian reached for her hand. The curve of the open and deserted coast, like an ivory boomerang held in the cool blue teeth of the sea, took on a flesh-and-blood feeling of reality now that she was with him. “Don’t you think it’s the best scenery you’ve ever seen?” She walked sedately a few paces off, swivelling the opened parasol on her shoulder so that the shadow of its hood rippled on the road as if taunting their walking feet to come under it out of the sun. “Yes,” she said, “it is good”—with a sincerity that for once satisfied him.

They turned on to the beach at Telok Bahang. The high forested hill of Muka rose leftwards, topped by the white pinnacle of a lighthouse. He led her to the cut-off beach seen from the lorry, over an arm of rocks, to a hummock of untouched sand. Mimi looked through his pack as soon as they sat down. “You naughty boy,” she laughed, “you didn’t bring a swimming suit.”

“Who needs one here?” He pulled off shorts and shirt, felt the sun rush against his flesh like warm water. “You’ll soon be as brown as a Tamil,” she said, looking at him. “You were fair and white when I first saw you.”

“Well, which do you like best?” unbuttoning the back of her dress.

“Black,” she said. “I want you to be like a Negro. Leave me alone,” she giggled. “I can manage.” The top part of her dress spread around, one petal fallen from the flower of her. “I can’t get as black as a Negro,” he said. “I would if I could, though, to make you happy.”

“I am happy,” she said lazily.

“Happier, then. Maybe I’ll rub boot-polish all over me, if that’ll satisfy you.”

“I wouldn’t like the smell.” She drew Chinese lettering in the sand.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“It’s a poem: ‘Poppies live best in a blue wind.’”

“Funny poem.”

“I read it in a book.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means what it says.”

“What’s a blue wind, though?”

“What poppies live best in,” she said.

“I don’t get it. I’ll bet you aren’t writing that at all.”

She rubbed it out. “Yes, I was. Why, don’t you like it?”

“I do.” He felt foolish and clumsy. “I don’t know what it means, but it sounds good.” They lay close to each other, and he thought it strange, his brown arms around her pale, almost tawny flesh. Her nakedness had no relation to the sun, whereas his had longed for it, taken the full rush of its energy and heat during his year in Malaya, and held it like a power for good. His body was lithe — sinewy arms and broad chest tapering to thin loins, and Mimi’s body was strangely cool to the touch, sun-rejecting, alert to his caresses and graceful in slow movements of reaction that tore passion out of him. The sea knitted its quiet feet into the sand, withdrew, came back with a slow hiss one tone below the wind, an echo and at the same time a forerunner of its chafing at the tree-tops behind. He felt locked in a timeless dream of sun, water, and sand, held by forest and sky and boulders and the cream-like water they suddenly ran into, away from the enervating sting of the sun and the subtle ache of satisfied loins. He caught her from behind, flattening her breasts in the spread of his fingers. Coconut oil on her hair mixed with salt water, and rubbing his face into it, he savoured the whole familiarity of her who lay beneath. In the long moment he dragged her laughing away into the gritty foam, and beyond into clear water, swimming back later to eat sandwiches and drink beer. He lit a cigarette, noticing that when he struck a match its flame was invisible because the outside heat was so intense. They slept naked, and when she nipped his thigh to wake him up he leapt after her along the sand, over boulders and into the shade of trees. A livid green snake ran off from them, its body effortlessly curving through leaves and twigs, no visible source of energy carrying it along. Trees like endless columns rose above, shutting out sky from the flowerless jungle. When they ran to the warm sand, a predatory urge came into his lions. She drew him into the shade of a rock, roused again by the blind inconsiderate animal force of his lust, her caresses sluggish until the overpowering crisis came into them, the orgasm beginning in her like the quick pleasure of warmth after the whole body had been unknowingly cold without.

“I’ll never leave Malaya,” he said after.

“You mean you love me?”

“You know I do. It’s marvellous here.”

The next evening he went back to Worthington, had no sooner unloaded his pack than Corporal Williams came to say he was to start operating on the DF frequency in the signals hut. “Give me time to get back to the bleeding camp,” Brian said, seeing he’d be unable to visit Mimi that night.

“Don’t blame me,” Williams said, one of those long-standing wireless-op corporals on whom prolonged morse-taking had acted like shellshock: left him with an apologetic face, a permanent stare, and hands that shook as if he’d got palsy. “A Dakota’s coming up from Singapore. Flying control say you’re to listen out for him.”

He picked up his drinking mug and tin of cigarettes, stuffed them in his small pack, and walked towards signals, dejected and enraged, spoiled by his fortnight of freedom. Hands in pockets, he followed the path through the trees, oblivious to a jumped-up sharp command from the adjutant standing outside the orderly room. “Airman!” he called again when Brian still headed for the medley of different morse-pitches coming from signals. He put his cap on, went over, and saluted.

“Why weren’t you wearing your cap, Airman?”

The sidewalk of the long, single-storied hut of the admin block was raised a foot above the soil on which Brian stood. The adjutant had a sardonic look on his face, fixed as if it had been branded there from birth — the only expression in fact that gave it a glimmer of intelligence. He had what Brian assumed (from his reading of mediocre novels) to be finely chiselled features, though there was no denying that drink and a giving-up of life had left them as blotched and pock-marked as the king’s-head side of an old coin. He wasn’t known for a martinet, was easygoing, almost dead-cush in fact, the more gentlemanly sort of officer who only bothered to pick up a “crime” when he was bored by the dead days of his regular life; the worst sort in a way because you never knew how to take him, were caught unawares like now when you relaxed your alertness and protective screen of cunning.

He had no answer, yet said: “With signals section being so near, I didn’t think it was necessary, sir”—his voice a calculated blend of defiance and regret that he had sinned. In a similar situation Kirkby had a knack of looking as if he’d just finished fourteen days’ jankers, so was half-pitied and merely told off for what “wrong” he had done, but Brian’s face and feelings were too friendly with each other to be much help. I’m not fresh into the air-force school like some, he cursed. I’ve done four years’ work in a factory already. I’m married and got a kid — though you wouldn’t think so, the way I let them boss me around.

“What’s your name?”

I’ll get seven days, I suppose. He could hear Baker laughing from the billet window. “Seaton, sir.”

“Why are you going to the signals section?”

He’ll ask me why I was born next. “I’m on watch, sir.” It’s best to stick it out. As Knotman says: “If you want to fight them, do it on your own terms. Otherwise you’ll lose.”

“Well, look, Seaton, don’t let me catch you outside the billet again without your hat being where it’s supposed to be.”

He walked away, laughing to himself that he hadn’t been confined to camp for seven to fourteen days. If I was the government I’d nationalize the air force and close it down.

He tuned in his receiver, turned the slow-motion dial until, key pressed, the strident whistle of the transmitter crept up on his eardrums. It rose to a shriek, the strong piercing cry of a soul in torment above the Ironside layer, burning the relays of its earthbound transmitter until he lifted his hand off the key and stopped it. He then tapped out a call to Singapore to test his signals strength. QSA 4—QRK 3. Not bad for half-past six.

A message came from the lumbering Dakota high above the backbone of jungle. In work his bitterness was forgotten, and after the plane landed he amused himself by sending poetry from the Pelican book by his set, each letter going out at fast speed, hot sparks burning the brain of anyone who could read its symbols. Word by word, line by rhythmical line, the whole of Kubla Khan found its way from his key, and he felt exhilarated in knowing that such a poem was filling the jungles and oceans of the Far East, coming, if anyone heard it, from an unknown and unanswerable hand. To send plain language on a distress (or any) frequency was, so the Manual of Persecution said, an offence to be tried by court martial, but as far as he knew, all official stations had either closed down for the night or were too far away to receive it. So La Belle Dame Sans Merci also went singing hundreds of miles out into darkness, perhaps reaching the soul of the man who wrote it and maybe also touching the source of golden fire that sent down these words to him in the first place. Dots and dashes went out at a steady workman-like speed, all poetic rhythms contained, even in the sending of one word. The mast top of the transmitter high above the trees outside propagated the chirping noises of his morse, as if releasing cages of birds into freedom.

CHAPTER 20

After a tea of sausages and beans he raced upstairs to get changed. “Tek yer bleddy sweat,” the old man called, when his workboots bashing on the wooden stairs caused the wireless to crackle.

Trousers and jacket hung on a chair-back: a suit his mother had got second-hand for six bob up Alfreton Road, utility blue with faint pin-stripes, shining at joints and not a turn-up in sight. But a suit was a suit and there was a tie and white shirt to make him spruce after a day mixing alum and flour at the shit-smelling pastebins — and five bob in his pocket out of the two pound wage-packet he’d given up downstairs. Stripping off boots and overalls, he whistled a wild jig set to the lyrics of a carefree Friday. The double bed under the window he shared with Arthur and Fred, though he as the eldest had charge of the room. In one corner was a cupboard holding his books, a hundred and thirty-seven, with a list of titles and authors pinned inside, and LONG LIVE STALIN AND RUSSIA chalked up in Russian on the back of the other door — words of magic made up by him from a Russian grammar asked for at the library a few months back. Opposite the window was a desk knocked together as a special favour by the old man, skilfully botched from packing cases and painted dark brown. Above hung a map of eastern Europe, its battleline marked by a band of pencilling. Soon it would be useless, for the grey tide of his constant rubbings-out had edged far towards Poland and Rumania, though in his cupboard was a folded map of western Europe which would complete the picture of Germany throttled — providing the Yanks and British got cracking with that second front.

He opened the cupboard, proud of his collection of books, though he’d read few of them. The combined bulk and story of The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables had kept his desire for reading away from the rest of the stood-up spines. Nevertheless, their existence gave some feeling of refuge from what tempests now and again sprang up (for no reason that he could see) in his brain. Most of the books had been stolen from a shop down town, brought from its endless shelves to the light of day under his shirt, often two or three at a time, costing maybe five bob, while in his hand were a pair from the threepenny box he’d pay for at the office with a nondescript starvo look on his face. He acquired them by the simple action of walking in and walking out Saturday after Saturday, bricks for the building of a barricade against something and someone as yet unformulated and nameless. Shelves grew, became classified into Languages, Fiction, and Travel, made a distinguished graphline along their tops as if to hold down the sombre colours of uneven spines. To run his fingers along them would mean washing his hands again before going out, with the risk of marking his white shirt that he was now pulling over his bare chest.

The books hadn’t been added to for more than a year, though the mood came easily back in which they had been stolen. Standing in the downstairs department where he couldn’t be seen, he had slid each week’s choices one by one between the undone buttons of his shirt. The smell of damp paper from row upon row of cellar-stored books was pungent in wet weather almost to the pitch of ammonia, and the coal fire burning in the corner grate of another room through the archway only seemed to make it more intense. He spent half an hour of search and excitement, a bliss in which he was lost, heightened by the stark fact reaching at him now and again that sooner or later he would have to load up and walk with them into the street, and for three hundred yards to the bus stop expect the manager’s cold hand to tap him on the shoulder and say: “Would you mind taking them books out of your shirt and coming with me to the cop-shop?” He went through the threepenny boxes, the sixpenny tables, the more expensive shelves, marking possibilities for his short list, and hoping other customers walking about wouldn’t buy them in the meantime.

There were rare occasions when no books interested him, and once, so firm was the procedure fixed in the ammoniac smell of the shop that he nevertheless came out with a French hymnbook, a Hindustani grammar, and a set of nautical tables, feeling as relieved and happy with his load at the bus stop as if they were books he had wanted to get his hands on for years.

He browsed through the boxes, looking at each title, opening the covers of some, knowing that sooner or later he must slide out the books he wanted — three, and sometimes as many as four or five if they were thin ones — and make off with them. In the far-off days when he paid for the books — no more than threepence each, though — he came one Saturday morning with Bert and browsed while his cousin impatiently flipped through the magazine table. Brian took his time, was at the mercy of his title-chasing eyes and page-checking fingers, so that the minutes ran into Bert’s brain and needled him to find Brian and say: “Got owt yet?” “These two”—he held them up, also picked out a guide to Belgium: “I’d like this as well, but it’s half a dollar.” “Let’s get going then you’re ready,” Bert said, “or we’ll miss the picture.” Hold on a bit, Brian was going to say — but his mood broke and he turned: “Let’s scram, then.” At the picture-house queue Bert handed him the book he’d wanted but couldn’t afford. “You’re my favourite pal,” he said, gripping his shoulders tight. “Here y’are: I’d do owt for yo’.” Brian was overjoyed, clutched at the small red book, bent its flexible gold-lettered covers, and saw its marbled pages. “Thanks, our Bert. I sha’n’t forget a favour like this.”

He didn’t: from that moment he never looked back as he stood by the shelves in the bookshop cellar department. Though feeling as if he were visible to all, since the tremble of hands and knock of knees seemed to give him a luminous shining quality, his fingers nevertheless hooked slyly out to the target his blue eyes fixed on. He stood without courage but with the gamble of a green-eyed cat on his shoulder, set in the circle of irresistible temptation, his fierce and quietly burning purpose to augment the bookshelves in his room while leaving the reading of them to whims of boredom and curiosity. His eyes were lights of panic, though kept quiet by an inner will which made his hands accurate in their sly split-second motion of simple extension and drawing-back loaded with a prize towards his shirt. One, two, three — they were safely in, and he walked up the stairs, not thinking about what was hidden between shirt-cloth and chest-flesh for fear he would fall top-heavy back and break his neck with guilt crash-bang at the stair bottom. With an abstracted air, as if dazed legitimately by the jewelled sight of so many books, he handed his pair of threepennies to the girl assistant, mumbling: “How much?” “Sixpence,” she said, and he thanked God at the first whiff of outside fresh air and petrol fumes, letting himself free into the roar and shoulder-knocks of Saturday crowds.

It was too good to last. Not that he became careless, he always had been. It was simply that his luck ran out and he was more ashamed afterwards at the thought of what a loon he must have looked to the girl assistant who saw him stuffing maps and books into his shirt, than for the crime, now revealed because he was caught, of stealing. At the cashbox he asked how much for a couple of mouldy Walter Scotts, and heard her say, the biggest shock he’d had for a long time: “You’d better take them books from up your jumper.” He did so, silent and white-faced: three books and two cloth-backed maps. “What’s your name and address?” No one was by the cashbox at that moment. He told her, but she didn’t write it down. Borstal, borstal, borstal were big words drum-beating against his brain. You’ll get sent to borstal for three years, and not the same one Bert’s bin in for the last six months, you can bet, so you’ll have no company. He stood. She looked at him. She was thin and bloodless, too, in a blue overall, young and old, eighteen and sixty, dying eyes and hands that slid the pile of books away and back on to the table when the manager emerged from a not-too-far-off doorway. Her heart he only knew the value of when she said softly: “Go on out, and don’t ever come in here again.” If the coppers had searched the house and found his book hoard he’d have been up for five years solid, but luckily the girl knew whose side she was on, and afterwards he wondered how much better the world would be if everybody stuck up for each other in that marvellous fashion.

He whistled a tune from “The Arcadians,” getting dressed on a Friday night in the full blood of his sixteen years, not thinking of a criminal life but gazing at his books. The cupboard they stood in was a present from his grandparents when they decided it wouldn’t fit into the new abode of the Woodhouse. It still carried a smell of spices: curry and cinnamon, thyme and mustard seed, camomile and sennapods and pepper, not yet killed by the more pungent odours of damp and aging paper.

White shirt flew on to him like a bird of peace, drawn together at the neck by a blue-dotted tie. He felt spruce and warm in his suit, the garb of a labouring man whose face was pale but whose muscles were hard enough to carry him along with confidence anywhere. He slammed the doors of his bookcase, put on his jacket, and ran downstairs. “Don’t be late,” his mother called as he let the back door of the scullery clatter to.

It was spring in the street, late sun coming from the tops of snow-clouds, children running in and out of air-raid shelters that blocked any clear view from up to down. The mass of close-knit factories and houses was spread on the steady slope of a hillside, though this was hardly noticeable with feet firm on cobblestones taking him energetically towards his meeting with Pauline. He lit a fag and flicked the match on to a window-sill (a notice within said: WREATHS AND CROSSES MADE TO ORDER AT SHORT NOTICE), catching sight of his greased-up quiff that made him look, he laughed, as handsome as the day was long. People were still rolling home from work by the time he hit the boulevard. A toffee paper blew towards him in the wind, fastened itself like a badge on a tree trunk.

She’ll be out any minute, he thought, approaching the factory, because the machines were switched off, leaving the high-sided street calm and quiet. It was a long, red-bricked, and straight-windowed building, a hundred years old though still in its prime. This sort of workpile had driven a nail of terror into him when he passed it as a child, not knowing what all the noise was about; but he knew now right enough, and wasn’t afraid of it, though on nearing any strange enormous factory at full blast he still felt a curious memory of half-fear stir in him at such compacted power that seemed pressing at every window ready to burst out like some fearful God-driven monster. Funny, he thought, how once you got in one it didn’t bother you, was peaceful almost because then you were on its side.

He stood by the clocking-out machine, eyed but not bothered by the commissionaire in his Home Guard uniform, a grey-haired old ramrod about seventy wearing a fish-and-chip hat, and smiling at a mirror in his bogey-hole to adjust a row of medal ribbons. England’s last hope, Brian grinned, the old chokka. I bet he got them medals mowing down fuzzy-wuzzies. “Waiting for the girls, I suppose?” he called.

“Waiting for a pal,” Brian responded after a pause. “Yo’ goin’ on p’rade, dad?”

“’Appen,” the man said, turning huffily away. Brian knew him to be too old for it now, felt a bit sorry he’d spoken. Poor bastard. He wasn’t the only one around. Nottingham’s Chelsea Pensioners, they called them, doing part-time work to eke out their ten bob and joining the Home Guard while there was still time to get themselves a winter suit and topcoat, going to the drill-hall now and again to meet younger pals and listen to lectures, but mostly standing in pubs and swilling beer out of those who’d treat them. I wonder if he’d give a cup o’ tea to a deserter? Brian thought.

He saw Jim Skelton on the stairs: “Hey up.”

“How do.”

“Where’s Pauline and Joan?”

“Int’ lavatory dolling up,” Jim said. “It’s tekin’ ’em long enough as well.”

“Fag?” Brian offered. “Fag, mate?”—to the old man.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

“Ta,” Jim said. The three of them lit up. “It’s still ’ard to get ’em,” the old man chipped in, “even if you’ve got munney.”

“It is an’ all,” Brian said. See all, hear all, say nowt. Eat all, drink all, pay nowt. There were a dozen cartons in the house, hidden in a wooden box under the coal, a present that crept in one night on his cousins’ backs. They’d not long since been lifted from a shop up the street, swiped from a shopkeeper who’d told Brian only the night before when he went there on the hunt for tobacco-hungry Seaton that he hadn’t a fag in the place. It was true right enough next morning after a visit from Colin and Dave. They’d not only cleared him out of fags, but silk stockings, a bottle of whisky, stacks of grub, cash.

They savoured their cigarettes. “A couple o’ sixteen-year-olds like yo’ two ought to be in the Home Guards,” the chokka said. “Do you the world o’ good.” Brian went numb at this, as if somebody had called him bone-idle or a copper’s nark. “That’s what yo’ think, mate.”

“I’d rather enjoy mysen than shoot a gun,” Jim told him. He was the same height as Brian but stockier, with a broad Tartar face, well-rounded dimpled chin, squared teeth and a squashed nose, ginger hair well flattened back from his forehead. He was a mechanic and looked after the girls’ sewing machines, saw that the khaki uniforms ran smoothly through so that everyone could get a share of that weekly bonus. Brian, though highly regarded by Jim for his store of books, respected him for his handiness with machines and electricity and the making of traction engines.

The girls were down already, and out of the door before a word was spent between the four of them, spread in a line across the street. “Where are we going, then?” Pauline wanted to know.

“Out,” Brian told her.

“Clever bogger”—she thumped him.

“Leave my mate alone,” Jim said.

“Men,” Joan exclaimed. “Allus stick together. Where’re we goin’ anyway? That’s what I’d like to know as well.”

Brian hoped he wouldn’t be contradicted: “Up Cherry Orchard.”

“It’s too far,” Joan said. “I don’t know what you want to go up there for anyway.”

“I do,” Jim laughed.

“Well, you wain’t catch me going,” Pauline said decisively. Brian winked at him: we’ll go in that direction anyway. “You can stop that, fawce dog,” Pauline said. “I saw yer winking, Brian.”

“You want your eyes testing, then.”

“You’ll get yourn blacked if you aren’t careful,” she threw back. “He don’t half think he’s a clever dick,” Joan said, ganging up with her pal.

“Go and get dive-bombed,” Brian said. “I only wanted you to come up Cherry Orchard.” Pauline was as tall as Brian: long brown hair spreading back over her buttoned-up, dark brown coat, which hid a ligher overall dress he’d glimpsed as she came down the stairs. She had white skin, and large brown eyes that seemed to see everything as a defence against the fact that she saw very little. Jim said she was one of the fastest at her machine and wasn’t so dreamy as she appeared, though both agreed that you wouldn’t think so to look at her. On some evenings, when left to their own thoughts or emptiness, undisturbed by the lack of talk, they walked arm-in-arm along sunlit lanes and streets that were silent between knocking-off time and dusk. Brian felt her largeness when she was with him, noticed how delicate was the expression of her hands and face when seen against the gracelessness of her general movement. She had a good figure — he knew it well by now — fine pear-shaped breasts, noticeable hips, and legs a bit heavy. It was almost obtrusive — but not quite, for she was just below the stature that could have given her the label of a “strapping girl.”

She was arm-in-arm with Joan in front, and they went down Ilkeston Road, followed at fifty yards by Brian and Jim. “They don’t seem in a good mood tonight.”

“P’raps they’ve got the rags on,” Jim laughed.

“I hope not,” Brian said. “I like Pauline, though. She’s a good sort, and passionate. How yo’ going on with Joan?”

“All right. She don’t say a deal either. Never says a dicky-bird sometimes all night. I asked her what was wrong once. We’d been tot’ pictures, and I thought she was fed up and ready to chuck me. I said: ‘What’s up, duck?’ when I was walking her home later. ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she burst out crying. She never told me what for either. I’d thought she looked a bit funny earlier on when she was in our house ’aving a cup of tea and some toast. When I kissed her good night, though, she was ever so passionate; so it blew over and she was as right as rain next day at work.”

Brian saw Jim’s courting as a more intense affair than his own. Not only did Jim work near his sweetheart — often called over to fix the belt on her machine, or to clean and oil it — but she spent most of every evening helping Jim’s mother, or sitting with him to guard his sisters and brothers while his parents were at the pictures. Pauline had never been to the Seatons, and neither did Brian have the intimacy of being with her all day at work. They met on many nights of the week, but whereas Jim and Joan had a physical closeness about them like any young couple a year married, Brian and Pauline were still at the hit-and-run stage, would melt away and almost forget each other until the next date because only the need to make love drew them together. He had never asked her to come home and sit in with his mother and father, Fred and Arthur and Margaret and Sammy, as if she belonged there. He envied this state between Joan and the Skeltons, but was somehow unable to build up a similar relationship between himself and Pauline. He spent many evenings at her house, and the two families had at one time known each other, but Pauline had never in any case suggested that she come to his home. Brian thought that maybe she was too shy to ask this, and he used her shyness — if it existed — as a way of preventing her from doing so. The idea of Pauline at home with his father and mother gave him spasms of embarrassment, and he was unable to say whether this was because he thought he would be ashamed or whether it was because he knew Pauline would dislike it and feel out of place. He didn’t want his mother and father to know he was courting, wanted to keep his second life a secret from them, as if, should they know, it would result in their sharing this love and intimacy and making it less real to him. But when his mother once said: “I met Mrs. Mullinder today and she says you’re going out with their Pauline,” he didn’t feel at all embarrassed, though he still wouldn’t ask Pauline home. “I go out with her now and again,” he told his mother. “Well,” she said, “that’s all right. She’s a nice gel. Only don’t come here, though, if you get anybody into trouble.” And that was that.

It was getting dark as they passed Radford Station. “Good,” Brian thought, “I don’t want to see anybody I know”—though no sooner had this crossed his mind than Uncle George came biking over the hill, from Woodhouse, calling as he went by: “Now then, Brian, you’re a bit young to be courting, aren’t you?” He put a good face on it, bawling back: “Ar, I’m doing all right an’ all.” Fancy shouting out like that, though he laughed at remembering back to when George had persuaded Vera to introduce him to a young unmarried woman in the yard, and she had sent Brian to tell Alice Dexter she wanted to see her a minute — all to help her stingy brother, blacksmith George. When Alice Dexter came into the house George picked up a newspaper to make her think he’d been reading like a sober educated man, but he’d been unable to read from birth and the paper was upside down. Which caused periodic laughs in the family, especially from Seaton, because he couldn’t read either and would never try to impress anybody that way by pretending he could.

Wind blew across the bare dark stretch of the Cherry Orchard. “Are you all right, duck?” he said to Pauline. “Keep well wrapped up.”

“It ain’t cold,” she whispered. The others were a merging shadow far to the left, intent on finding their own private hollow in which to snug down. He held her tightly around the waist. “We’ll find a good place.” Stars were pale and liquid-eyed, each as if nervous at not knowing whether it was next to be hidden away. “It’s marvellous out here. It’s warm and lonely.”

“It is an’ all,” he responded. “My grandma used to live over there”—pointed far off into the darkness. “And my grandad. He was a blacksmith.” An inexplicable pride came at the thought of his grandfather having been a blacksmith. Blacksmith was a word of skill and hardiness: a smith makes things, and black means the toughest sort of work — like when I did that bout of flue-cleaning — the shaping of iron and steel between hammer and anvil, moved by muscle in a subtle mixture of controlled strength.

“Ooooooh!” she drawled out. “Mek a wish, Brian.”

“What for? Mind that bush.”

“I saw a shooting star.”

“I didn’t, though”—pulled out of his blacksmith world.

“There’s another one, look”—still pointing.

“Yes, I saw that one,” he was glad to own. “I’ve made a wish.”

“So’ve I.”

“What did yo’ wish?” he wanted to know.

“I’m not telling you. It don’t cum true if you tell anybody.”

“Well,” he teased, “I shan’t tell you what I wished then.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said, offended. “Don’t if you don’t want to.”

“What do you think I am?” he cried, indignant. “If you wain’t tell me, I’m not going to tell yo’.”

“Well,” she said, “if you tell me what yo’ wished, mine’ll still come true.”

“Mine wain’t, though,” he reasoned, no thought of self-sacrifice.

“P’raps our wishes was the same,” she ventured. This put him on his guard: “I bet they worn’t.” I didn’t wish we could get married, he told himself. It’s enough if she did, though I’ll bet she’ll be wrong. “You know what mine was, though, don’t you?” she said, pressing his hand. He did. It leapt across with no words, a shaft of love unseen in the darkness, meeting the wish he had made because no other was possible for him, being with his girl in the middle of the Cherry Orchard in the first darkness of a spring evening. Her words came sweet, into an isolation of something better than he’d ever known, even though it wasn’t the first time they’d worked out this desire between them.

“Mine was the same,” he said, seeing the two lines written on the picture in the Nook parlour: “If you love me as I love you, nothing will ever part us two.” The sentiment quickly vanished because he thought that if he told it to Pauline she might laugh and see him as too sloppy to go out with. Not that he was unhappy at this.

A moon was up, had severed all connection with the chimneypots of distant houses, was responsible for the faint luminous gleam that held the humps and hollows and solitary bushes back from the hand of complete darkness. A gentle warm infiltration of visibility overspread from hedge and houses to a vale of Serpent Wood, a vague light giving the impression that the dwindling countryside of the half-mile Cherry Orchard was a vast and untouchable heath-land through which no arteries of life ran. He pulled up a handful of fresh grass to smell. “I can’t see Jim and Joan any more,” she said.

“They’re just over there,” he told her. “They’d hear us if we shouted.” To stop any idea of it he drew her to him, arms fastened around the waist and shoulders of her coat. He caught her mouth, half-open to start some reply to his remark, and felt the moist warm surprise of her lips that closed and hardened to a passionate response, her arms also reinforcing the kisses that she seemed to try and repulse only by increasing the forward pressing of her own. The uneven ground caused him to lurch, and though he kept balance without thinking where to place his feet, he succeeded in breaking the force of her kisses, holding her to him and placing his lips on her at such an angle that it was impossible for them to breathe. Both knew the meaning of this manoeuvre; it gave each a chance of proving that the power of greatest love was on his side; for the one who craved breath first bore the lesser love. The closeness of her body and the pressure of her face and lips hardened and sweetened the urgent rod of his loins. He moved his lips over hers, neither taking nor giving breath, prolonging the fleshy meeting with her mouth, which was one second dormant and then moving to prove that she loved him with all her strength and was nowhere near losing the contest. He went harder into her face, wanting to lift his head away from her, though, and laugh and pull in gusts and lettershapes of pure air, but the sweetness of Pauline, the well and slight shifting of her lips drew him in so that his kisses, like tears, grew in strength at the feel of her love.

The wind came against them like an outside kiss from the distant curve of the woods (the last leapfrogged obstacle down from the bleak Pennines), and as the pushing within grew at the deep prolonged valley of the kiss, the air and grass and darkness outside pulled away and left them in the grip of an insoluble torment of love. Pauline’s hands were at his neck, around under the hair at the back of his head, and she hoped that he would see through her equal torment and relax his wild unfeeling pressure by allowing her to breathe and win because she loved him more. His inner world grew to a blind illuminated space, the inside of a sphere that marked the limit of all pictures in his mind and turned his kiss-breaking into a vision. This was marvellous. He wanted to breathe, but held himself, even though the artistry of his kisses suffered, went on through brief seconds of control with each one the reason for further prolongation. His hands roamed up and down her back, from neck to shoulders, to take away the drumbeats of his lungs protesting against such obstinacy. I love you, Pauline, I love you. Give in. Start breathing and let me prove it. She pulled him tighter, as if to say that the kiss could go on for another five minutes for all she cared. His knees shook. He moved his head from side to side to keep a further second of breath in him: like swimming under water and hoping to reach a better part of the shore before surfacing. Though her lips were fast closed, she swayed also, moaned and tried shaking his head away. He knew that a few more seconds would kill him, for his lungs were barrels of gunpowder and the only vision left in his lighted sphere was that of a curving fuse going into them, with smoke that had travelled along it now close. If he kept on, he would die like a man does when he drowns.

She drew her hands away and he wondered what was happening — until her fists came down, and in the crash they made against his spine he heard her taking enormous drinks of breath out of the air. Tears were on her cheeks and he went in this time to a kiss of love in which both could breathe, so that he felt tears springing to his own eyes, but tears of laughter and happiness. They leaned against each other, hands free. “I love you, Brian,” she said.

They went into a wide hollow and lay down by a bush, dark banks bringing the night closer. The earth felt damp under his hand, and she drew him down to it, spreading kisses like salt on his face as if to recompense them both for his victory of kisses up in the field and bring them back to loving. He tasted the sweetness of her lipstick and opened each button of her coat as he fought back his own kisses into her loving mouth.

They afterwards lay in the dip of the Cherry Orchard with no watch between them to tell what time it was, each smoking a cigarette to give taste and body to the fragrance of their exhaustion and an illusion of comforting warmth to the humid freshness of the night. “You ought to get yoursen a topcoat,” she said. “You’ll get pneumonia like that, duck.”

He laughed: “Not me. I’ve got blood like boiling water. A walking stove.”

“Still,” she said. They walked out of the hollow. “It must be after nine. I wonder what happened to the others?”

“Gone, I expect. Joan lives at Lenton, don’t she?” He felt loosened from the fever, vibrant and sharp against the night air, as much in love with the rustle of bushes and odours of soil and grass as with Pauline. He stopped and drew another kiss from her, gentle and indrawn. “Well,” she said with a laugh, “you can never have enough, can you?”

“I can’t”—taking her naked hand by the dark shadows of Colliers’ Pad. They came to the lights of the main road: “Mam and dad’ll be at the pictures, being it’s Friday,” she said. “I don’t expect they’ll be back yet.”

“If your dad’s in, p’raps we’ll ’ave a game o’ darts. I’m hoping to beat ’im one of these days.”

“You’ll never do that: he had too much practice when he was in ’ospital.” He agreed: Ted Mullinder had been bed-bound through an accident at the pit. A truck underground had run into his foot and all but crushed it when he was coming back from the face one day. He’d got off too soon at the skip, thinking the truck had stopped when it hadn’t. It was as if a shark had got him, pain leapfrogged to his brain and exploded there, blowing him into a mixed land of black-out and dreams in which he had mistaken his own pain and suffering for somebody else’s, then woken up to find with horror that it had been his own. Operation after operation, and now he was a sad asthmatic cripple with a job on top, the only compensation being that he had become the unbeatable champion of the local darts team. On most nights he made his way on two sticks to the John Barleycorn, slung down three pints of mild, and got his hand in before a game by going round the clock. Though able to stand, he played from a chair set at the regulation paint mark, preferring to sling his arrows this way because his hospital marksmanship had been built up from a wheelchair. He was broad-shouldered and dark, kept in life and friendship by sufficient bouts of ironical cheerfulness, buttressed against despair by his wife and four daughters.

Mullinder now sat at the table with his bad leg spread towards the fire while his wife, a tall nut-brown gypsy-like woman, followed Brian and Pauline in with a loaded enamel teapot and set it before him. What a life, Brian observed: waited on like a king. Not that I wish it was me, with that bad foot. Eleven-year-old Maureen took up the other side of the hearth to read a comic. “Hey up, Brian,” she called out, no sooner was he in.

“Did you pass your scholarship?” he asked. You could tell she was one of the family all right, her face oval and alive, and even more mischievous because of her age.

“I don’t know yet. But I don’t care if I pass or not. I’ll feel daft in a uniform and all that. I want to go to work when I’m fourteen, not stay till I’m sixteen.”

“Don’t be barmy,” Mullinder said. “You’re a lot better off at school. You don’t know you’re born until you start wok, Maureen Madcap!”

“I’ll get mad all right in a bit, our dad. I’ve told you before not to call me Maureen Madcap.” But from almost crying with shame and shyness, she called to Brian: “Hey, Brian, you know what heppens when you wash too much?”

“What?”

“You get soap rash! Don’t you, our dad?”

“Go on,” he called. “I reckon Maureen Madcap’s the name for yo’, right enough.”

Mrs. Mullinder set Pauline to wash more cups, and put Brian at the supper table facing her husband. “Tek a couple o’ them cheese sandwiches,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind sacs in your tea, but I don’t get the sugar ration till tomorrow.”

“That’s all right. We’ve got nowt else but them.” He felt it strange that an issue should be made of it, as if he’d strayed into a higher degree of civilization than he was used to. Tea was tea, whether it was dosed with saccharine or sugar. In fact, the ration at home was always three weeks in advance because his mother had wheedled it out of the grocer. “She’s clever,” Mr. Mullinder laughed when he mentioned it. “When the war ends she’ll have had three weeks for nowt.”

“What’s the score on the Russian front these days?” Mullinder asked, teasing Brian’s obsession, who took him seriously: “They’ll be in Germany soon. I’m sure they’ll get to Berlin before anybody else.”

“Let’s hope they stay there,” Mullinder said. “They want to finish off that lot once and for all, this time.”

Brian ripped into a sandwich: “I’ll say.”

“Get my fags out o’ my mac pocket, Pauline,” her old man said. Brian liked to see her doing such things, washing-up, slicing bread, paring cheese, and spreading butter. He observed the mature sixteen-year-old shape of her body as best he could with so many in the house, saw how attractive it showed when prized out of the voluminous thick coat and clothed only in the blouse and skirt she had worked in by her machine all day. The raw animal sweetness lingering from their lovemaking in the Cherry Orchard still beat in his loins, and now and again as she passed him at the table he caught a faint odour of her face and skin, of powder and lipstick she lightly used — though her father had told her time and time again not to wear it. He was surprised that no one could twig they had spent the last hour loving each other, felt it should be showing in their eyes and the way they moved.

He ate his food slowly, drank tea, only half-aware of the squabble going on between Maureen and Doris, the eldest daughter, who was to be married in a month and seemed to be getting her bellyful of family fights before leaving them off for good. Mullinder switched the news on hopefully, but it didn’t get a look in, so with a pit curse — also drowned — he flicked it off again. I don’t know how he puts up with this racket, though maybe he likes it — you never know. It’s certainly a living family. If there was an argument like this in our house, fists and pots would be flying already. Pauline sat opposite, eating her supper. She caught his look and picked up her cup of tea to dispel it. He was overwhelmed by an impossible thought, an outlandish idea that would drag him from all settled notions of work and courting (and freedom that nevertheless existed between the two states) and set him on a course so new and head-racking, yet in a way perhaps wonderful and good, that he wished the vision of it had never fixed itself like a hot picture-transfer against his skin. Maybe she already is pregnant, he thought, we’ve done it often enough.

CHAPTER 21

Seven hours gone, and seven to go: it was a long watch, two workdays wrapped up in the parcel of one black night. The air in the hut had left off being air and turned to sweat. Talk about dead-beat! This is what trade unions is good for, but they’re all verboten in this Belsen. He screwed up his eyes so that they opened wide when the pressure of his knuckles lifted, adjusted a few of the dozen dials to get spot-on frequency, and tapped out a legible two-letter call-sign KB KB KB — more to fill his own earphones with a companionable noise than drag other and distant operators from their stolen half-burnt slumber. The morse lacked energy, like his eyes and mind. Singapore was silent down the steps of latitude: Saigon, Karachi, Negombo — meaningless ghosts beyond the periphery of consciousness. He wrote his call in the log: half-past three, wanting five hours still to be back in camp and under the sluicing cold bite of a shower. Most of all, he wanted the bullock cart of the year to take off its brakes and roll quickly into next week, for he and Knotman had formed a jungle-rescue team and arranged that its initial exercise be an attempt to climb Gunong Barat from the south. He’d done weeks of work, had drafted charts to show how the grub-tins and biscuits would be divided between the six donkey-backs of the team, and had already plotted each night’s camping position on a three-inch map he’d spent a week drawing in the camp library. “Planning the trip’ll be the easiest part of it,” Knotman said. “Don’t bank on three miles a day. Make it two.” I suppose he should know, Brian thought. Even so, we’ll do more than two: I could go that far on my head. At Transmitters the wireless mechanic was breathing life into a walkie-talkie, and Brian had more overlapping maps to sketch and trace, and would have to queue in a day or two for injections against typhus and typhoid. Camp monotony was broken, a thing of the past — and as a team ever after they could be called on to trek and search for the survivors of any kite that belly-dived in the north Malayan jungle.

A month ago he had gone by air-sea-rescue pinnace as relief sparks to a buoy-laying scheme off the Barat coast. The pinnace made tracks like a well-polished beetle around tiny jungle islands, while Brian’s morse kept a couple of rusty and worn-out naval tugs in touch with Kota Libis. There were few messages to send, and he spent most of the day on deck, reading by the donkey engine. At night the pinnace was moored a few yards out from an island, a half-sphere of grapefruit jungle with no more than six feet of sand for a beach. He did anchor-watch, and looking down in the darkness, there was nothing in the sea but grey humps of giant jellyfish, stationary and sinister below the surface as if waiting for a sleep-laden inhabitant of the boat to lose his footing and provide a meal for them. Now and again he swung the leadweight, sounding fathoms to make sure the boat didn’t drag its anchor. At seven he watched the sun feeling its way up the jungle of Gunong Barat, showing him at this close range secret valleys and subsidiary hilltops invisible from the camp, and coastal knolls coming almost down to the still night-laden sea. The sun poured yellow fire on to each pinnacle and dyed the greyish villages red as if they were in some nightmare waterless land of iron ore, then hardened to a purple and crimson. Yellow grew out it, came towards green, until the sun broke through its barrier and slowly turned the water around the pinnace into a sea of blood.

He slung down his pencil, restless from the memory of that fabulous dawn, felt feverish in the dank tobacco-soaked air on which insects seemed content to draw their calories of existence. Kicking open the door, he smelled the warm stillness of the tiger-night, took up the rifle and walked outside, feeling the tall brittle blades of elephant grass chafing his knees as he made his way slowly towards the far wall of trees. I hope I don’t put my foot on a snake, he thought, going slower so as to give any comfortably curled-up krait or cobra time to make its getaway. Half a mile off was an open shed in which an airman armed with a wooden club was set to guard petrol and tools. A few nights ago, Brian reminded himself, the poor sod had seen the face of a full-grown tomcat tiger gimletting from tall grass outside. With no doors to hold it back should the tiger roam around, he nearly curled up and died at the shock, but was able to use the field telephone and explain with garbled obscenity to some officer at the mess that they’d better come and get him before he was chewed to bone and gristle. Half an hour later a jeep of drunken officers roared up the runway firing Stens — by which time the tiger was safe in its hide-out jungle.

Maybe I’ll meet that tiger: he slid a bullet up the spout. My claws are as sharp as his while I’ve got this.303 in my fist. The fear livened him and he walked on, though slowly, as if a cord were tied to his feet. The grass moved, bent into a hollow. He peered and saw nothing, a shadow of wind perhaps, though his.303 burst against it, sending a hemisphere of deafening noise shaking towards the hills.

Back in the hut, he switched the tuning dial from its allotted wave-length to find some music, hoping no plane would choose to send an SOS while he wasn’t listening. The needle flickered across graduated readings behind the glass, settled on a station whose music he eventually recognized (able to follow the tune, though static made mincemeat of crotchets and semi-quavers) as Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne Suite.” He remembered hearing it first when he was fourteen, alone in the house as it played in the interval of Daudet’s play, the same music now wavily crossing the Pacific. The sad melody had haunted him ever since, bringing sharply before his eyes the vision of a sun going down over the flat grey land of the Camargue, where the air is cool and still to the insane cry of someone dying of love.

When the first hearing of the music finished, he was in tears, a shameless unfair desecration of his working manhood. It was an evening in summer before the advent of darkness, when children had stopped screaming along the asphalt path by the lavatories, and the group of women who normally gossiped at the yard-end had gone in to give them their teas. No anti-aircraft guns belted away at illusive aeroplanes and no sirens wailed their warning song. It was the dead hour between tea and supper, light and dark, between the end of barking dogs and the start of lad-gangs calling at passing girls from unlit lamp-posts. The feeling of poetry and death was broken as his mother said, having suddenly walked in: “What’s up, Brian? You’re never crying, are you?”

“No,” he answered. “The sun hurt my eyes today when I was out up Trent.”

The same music came to him now, in places distorted or impossible to hear, so that he tried to tune it clearer, using all his skill to bring it free from the murderous inundations of atmospherics. He allied himself to the music, related it to the workings of his own brain. In the enervating damp heat of Malaya, both thought and action took place in a kind of haze, and he sensed strongly that his mind could be far deeper and sharper than it was. The only practical way, it seemed, of reaching this occasionally perceived and ideal state in the near future was to get back to England, for he imagined that in a colder and clearer temperature his thoughts and perceptions would deepen and increase.

He glimpsed it now, but vaguely, because the music confused him with self-pity, reminding him that no letter from Pauline had come for a fortnight, and no news from Mimi either; and he couldn’t envisage a future beyond the dark escarpments of Gunong Barat.

He hadn’t seen Mimi for several weeks, in fact, and through the hard and alternating watches (increased day-work because bombers patrolled the jungle on square-searches, termed exercise) he pondered on specific reasons for it. The widow, she said, had been told of his visits and threatened to throw her out if he came there again because she didn’t like English airmen invading the sacred territory of her house. Or is Mimi making this up to put me off? There was no way of knowing, and brooding gets you nowhere. Sooner or later the good things end, your troubles start. Only for so long can you think the world is a lovely place to be in, until with a couple of mild hits between the eyes it reminds you that you don’t count as to whether it’s good or not. Some invisible thug takes you by the shoulders and shakes you this way and that, roaring all the time: “You’re alive, you stiff-necked jumped-up bastard. You’re alive, I’m telling you. And here’s summat to let you know it.” You’re left tottering, trying to see what’s wrong and put things right, when underneath all you want to do is crawl away and sleep while the trouble and bother works itself out — die, in other words. I should have known things would go this way with us, but that’s the trouble about being slow on the uptake, because I didn’t do anything to stop the rot setting in.

Her silence hit him like a double hammerblow of optimism and despair, a carpenter’s pendulum to stop you doing anything, yet keep you living. Where do you go from the highest point of passion? To sustain it into love would have meant seeing her more often, which, because he was a prisoner, was impossible. He reached the agony of believing that perhaps he had wanted the break to come, because the toil and emotional fight needed to sustain what he may have imagined to be there in the first place was too much for his diminishing energy in the blood-boiling north of Malaya. Maybe she just doesn’t want to see me and that’s that.

Granted that what the eye didn’t see the heart couldn’t grieve, he realized he was nevertheless doing the dirty of the rottenest sort on Pauline, thought of her often from his far-removed and new-cut stomping grounds of Kota Libis, knowing that while opportunity offered he hadn’t the will to do more or less than accept it. He had neither felt nor heard any angel of moral injury on his silent expeditions through the Patani darkness and swamps to see Mimi, and as long as he didn’t wonder whether or not Pauline was playing the same trick on him, he hardly thought to explore the unfaithful pointers of his own actions. But he was eventually pushed into considering such a possibility when the idea that Mimi could be betraying him crept into his mind. And this was such an enraging idea that he forgot about his injury to Pauline (and maybe hers to him) as soon as it was broached, detesting Mimi for a betrayal he could never have proof of.

Mimi was strange to him because her one-sided character appeared so complete. Her chief trait seemed one of a lassitude so overpowering that his only reaction to it was anger. He saw no way in which they could really and finally meet in love, his immediate dark reason for this being that they were too much strangers to each other, having been born and reared in different parts of the world. I understood Pauline, he told himself, so why shouldn’t I get through to Mimi? Still, some women are harder to get to know than others — and don’t I know it? — for I was four years with Pauline before we had to run down to the Registry Office and get spliced up. Mimi is too passive, and I want somebody to grind myself to bits on maybe. Don’t be a loon: all you want is to shag yourself silly, you know you do; what brains you’ve got dive overboard as soon as you get a woman hot and undressed in bed. Mimi’s doing it on you, and it’s looped your vanity in a half-nelson. You thought you were all set to make a go of it, live it up for good perhaps, get married maybe (after you’d ditched Pauline, you foul bastard), and fill her with a few kids. Well, think on it: you’ll be back in England in six months and then where will you be with all this humming and aahing? Who knows where I’ll be in six months? I could walk away from this wireless set, tread on a snake outside the door, and be dead before I knew where I was. So all that crap about the future wain’t wash; except I suppose I’ll be back in England soon and loving it up with marvellous understandable Pauline.

Life on the camp was boring between morse and map-making. Twenty-five dollars a week at eight to the pound was only enough to keep him in cigarettes and odd meals at the canteen, so he couldn’t dazzle himself with the expensive lights of Palau Timur more than once a month. No wonder Mimi’s fed up with me, he reasoned. If dad could send me a few quid every week — like some blokes get — I’d be able to jazz things up a bit. The poor bogger needs every penny for himself, even though he is at work. I don’t expect the couple o’ bob a day I allow Pauline would make much difference to my whooping it up either, because she could do with it, as well as the odd food parcel I’m able to post off now and again.

The camp cinema had been six weeks closed because the rickety equipment had given out. It was so old they must have got it from the scrap-heap outside some shut-down flea-pit. You could go, of course, to the Nanking Talkies in the village, but it was a dead loss hearing Rin-Tin-Tin barking in Chinese and the man on Movietone News ringing his bell in Hindustani three months out of date, and seeing joss-smoke billowing from Buck Jones’s ivory-handled guns. So he’d sit in the billet, reading for hour after hour until his concentration snapped and he was ready to argue with anyone who happened to be about. No one believed in God, he found, and most would vote Labour if they were old enough. Getting them to admit a monarchy useless proved easy, and from then on, it wanted only half an hour to win them over to a form of Communism terrifying in its simplicity. At the apogee of his boredom he found himself possessed by a wild and compelling gift of the gab, would sit on the end of his bed and talk talk talk on any subject that came into his head, spouting without effort and only realizing afterwards that the boys had actually been listening with enjoyment, had been influenced by his voice, laughing when he said something amusing and nodding in agreement when he came out with the extreme breath of revolution. They’ll believe anything when they’re bored, he saw, exhausted from his peroration, pleased at himself as he fell asleep over his book.

Baker sent paper aeroplanes flying from his bed, happy when they found landing-grounds on somebody’s book, letter, or face. He captured a large dung-beetle that hovered clumsily around the lights, imprisoned it in a matchbox while searching through his locker for a length of cotton. “Don’t hang it,” somebody shouted. “It looks a strong bastard: make it work.” He tied the cotton to the beetle’s back leg and the other end to one of his paper aeroplanes. “There’s no life in the bloody place,” Baker shouted as he released the beetle. With a buzz like the roar of a minute engine, it soared through the open door and lost itself in the trees. “Funny bastard,” a voice said.

Brian was calm, halfway through a novel and wanting to finish it, but Baker was in a hard, useless, destructive mood. Someone put “Hora Staccato” on the gramophone, but Baker ripped it off and skimmed it out of the door so that it shattered against a tree. He then sat by the pile of records and slew the fifty of them after “Hora Staccato”—looking at each label before committing it to smithereens. No one thought the records good enough to save, as they were all of tuneless tunes out of the good old days.

He broke the spell, caught sight of the table on which he sometimes spread a mattress and stretched out when he couldn’t stay awake. On its surface, reaching from side to side of the hut, was a kettle (that would leave a black ring when lifted), a tin of sugar housing a lucky ant or two, a packet of strong Air Ministry tea, a couple of tin mugs with flex around the handles, and a haversack of bread and cheese. Propped in a corner was a loaded rifle whose meat-skewer bayonet had been used to spit holes in a tin of condensed milk also on the table. There were over a hundred.303 rounds in a floor box, fifty more than the camp armoury knew about, hard cylindrical hand-outs with lead noses to punctuate or terminate whatever moved outside or in.

The music grew back — or he turned round to it, unwilling to be entirely alone. A thought he considered stupid and out of place came to him: “I don’t want to go up to Gunong Barat. The only place I want to be is Nottingham.” It slid the earth from under him, like the trick when someone flicks the cloth from beneath a tableful of pots without disturbing them, the difference being they are nearer the reality of true-grained wood. With the ground insecure, he knew he would still go to Gunong Barat, which, though a self-erected obstacle, had to be crossed nevertheless because he had created it in his own mind as a stepping-stone to the future. In any case, Gunong Barat meant the jungle, a luring and mysterious word that had taunted him all his life from books and comics and cinema, an unknown flimsy world meaning something else, so that it would teach him perhaps whether or not he wanted to enter the real world it sometimes appeared to be screening. Without the expedition there would be no future, only a present, an ocean of darkness behind the thin blue of the day, a circle of bleak horizons dotted by fires burning out their derelict flames.

He remembered an encounter with Mimi one night on his way back from the Egyptian café. She passed him in the darkness, was a few paces ahead before he called her name. When she turned, his feeling of gladness became one of misery at thinking she might have hoped to pass him unnoticed. “Where are you off at this time of night?”

Both were shocked at the meeting: “I’m going home,” she said. “I felt like walking.” She seemed in a hurry and he went along with her.

“I could do with a stroll as well,” he said, curt and sarcastic, a mood that turned her into a perverse witch, no longer beautiful, and withdrawing. Well, he said to himself, you wanted to get to know her, now you have. She’s a whore, doing it on you. They walked in silence, he feeling a hopeless awkwardness, unable to speak as if his throat were full of soil.

“I had a hard night,” she told him, walking unconcerned by his side. “An American ship is in harbour, and I’ve danced for five hours. We thought the police were going to come, but the Americans just got senseless and took each other back to their ship.”

“I’ve been in the canteen,” he said, “playing dominoes.” The turning-off point was reached. A few people were about. A trishaw from the last ferry was taking a drunk back to camp. He wished it were midday and dazzling sun so that the shopfronts would be decked out like open pomegranates, with hair-cream and razor blades, watches and fountain pens, cameras and cheap shirts, fruits and food and people and traffic. He felt uneasy at being alone in a darkness in which you couldn’t really be alone, sensing beneath Mimi’s nonchalance her deeper uneasiness at being with him. Before he could broach the question, she said: “There isn’t a free night this week. Three Dutch ships are coming in and I’ll have to work all the time.”

He said nothing, regretting that he was unable to make an immediate answer, though knowing it wouldn’t have done much good. Her mind was fixed. Maybe she’s fed up only for the time being and we’ll be on the old footing in a week or two. His notion that she’d found someone else made him sick with jealousy and disappointment, too confused to ask himself what had eaten into their love. I’d seen it coming, and maybe that was what was wrong. “I’m busy myself these days,” he said.

“We’ll see each other again.” I suppose this is what they call a stiff upper lip, he thought; the stupid bastards. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got an evening off,” she said, almost tenderly. Maybe she’s happy I’m not doing my nut and pasting her all up the road. “I’ve been thinking of taking a job at Singapore,” she went on. “In fact, there’s a good chance I’ll be on my way soon.” This meant little to him: she’d spoken of it months ago, and it might come to nothing. But he said: “I hope you don’t go. I love you too much to let you go as easy as that.”

“I know,” she said slowly. They kissed passionately, then broke away and walked in their different directions.

He swore at the night, at himself, at everything under the night moon, his curses hammering at the stockade that had been built around the limit of his words without his knowing it, even before he was born perhaps. I can’t say or do a thing right. Christ, I’d cut my throat if this was the first tart I’d gone out with.

He was hailed from a passing tri-shaw: “Hey, Brian, you dirty ramrod, where have you been sinning tonight? I didn’t see you in the stews of Pulau Timur.” Belt up, he thought, black as thunder. “If you want a lift, get in,” Knotman went on, “but if you want to walk your feet off your ankles, I don’t give a Gunong Barat.”

“I heard you the first time.” He relented and sat in the tri-shaw beside him, the padding feet of the coolie clip-clopping along the empty road. “Been to the Boston Lights?” he asked Knotman through the high power of his whisky breath.

“Not likely. Costs too much. I got me a nice steady girl, Eurasian, nurse at the hospital. Says she loves me and will I marry her? ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘be glad to when I’ve made up my mind.’ ‘You’re unjust,’ she says, ‘you’re persistently procrastinating, like Hamlet’ (she’s an intellectual like me: that’s why we get on so well). ‘It’s hardly fair,’ she says, ‘the way you use me’ (reads The Tatler as well). ‘We should get married, you know.’ We sit in the Botanical Gardens feeding the mokeys: ‘I’m rotten,’ I say to her, shedding tears of blood. ‘I’m the rottenest melon as ever rolled God’s earth; I’m as rotten as they come, so help me bloody God. So you’d better forgive me or I won’t be able to marry you; and stop taking my feed bottle away from me like that, you sly bitch, or I’ll sock you on the jaw.’ ‘I’m finished,’ she says. ‘You treat me worse than any prostitute from the Boston Lights. You only treat me so badly because you’ve lost your self-respect.’ Goes all deep down and perceptive on me, really gets her nails into my inside tripes — metaphysically speaking, of course (I’ve read The Tatler as well). ‘I’m going,’ she says, ‘I’m off. You’ve hurt me too much’—and here’s me rubbing my psychological sores because they’re giving me hell. But she ups and goes, and that’s the way life is with a woman. I meet her at the gate. ‘Where are you off?’ I asks. ‘I was hoping I’d see you again because I forgot to give you the poem I’d written to you.’ (I’m sobbing now, almost anyway.) ‘I’ve been working on it a week and have found it very difficult not to give it you before it was finished. But it’d be a terrible shame if we were to part for ever in this flippant fashion, before you know how much I really love you, and without me having shown you the marvellous poem I’ve been composing for you in my heart these last three months.’ I charm her — you understand? She listens. ‘I’m sorry,’ I says. ‘True love never runs smooth.’ (Her face has traces of smallpox, but I’m crazy about her.) ‘I’d like to hear your poem,’ she says. So we go back to the seat we were on before. I got out a piece of paper, maybe my will and testament, and made up a poem on the spot, anything to save my broken-down future marriage. I’ve been divorced after marriage, which was bad enough because it was against my Christian principles, but never split up in an irreparable divorce before marriage, which would be against my pagan principles. So I make up a poem as Miss Prim-and-Proper waits for the beautiful lines to flow — you know, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and all that crap:

‘I’ve loved you, my darling, since birds began to fly

Since apple-loaves baked in my oven’s eye

When fires begin you can’t put them out

With anything less than a waterspout’—

Well, that was the first verse and it wasn’t bad, being made up on the spot, even though I do say so myself. I’m not a Limey so don’t expect any false modesty from me. But after three more verses it wasn’t so much that my education (or lack of it) began to show as that my upbringing and dirty mind came through, so that, old buddy, I ended up with such a mouthful of barrack-room filth that she fled from me clutching her skirt, and the last thing I saw of my dark little nurse was two tri-shaw wheels going round a corner. I was broken-hearted and still am. I got myself a few drinks to drown my sorrows, because I’m sure I’ll never see my living doll again, and who can blame her? But out of the rotten carcass came forth sweetness, as they say in Sanders of the River — or was it Das Kapital? — and I’m going to start writing poetry as a life of penance. I’m going to be a real poet, even though I do say so while I’m as stoned as an iguana. I’m going to be a writer, get spot cash for deep thoughts. So when you see me tomorrow, remind me of what I say, because if you don’t I’ll forget all about it.”

Brian guided him to his billet, tipped him fully dressed on his bed, and pulled down the mosquito-net.

When Brian laughed at his own self-pity the bark of a pariah dog made a duet with him. The music ended and so did his sadness, and with a blank mind he walked to the door and booted it open, shivering as cold air blew into his sweat-ridden shirt. I want to get out of this, he said. Another three months and I’ll be on the boat, thank God. Five hundred yards towards the airstrip was another similar hut where pal Jack, not having to keep an all-night watch, had spent the last eight hours with his head down; and eastwards black humps of forest rolled up to the highest ridges of Malaya. He pissed a tune against a petrol tin to keep himself company, then went back and slammed the door.

He listened out on frequency: nothing. The whole night sky of South-East Asia was empty of planes as far as he was concerned, but he didn’t want to go to sleep. As soon as I get my head down, some no-good crippled kite will start belting out an SOS — and then where would all of us be? They’d be dead and I’d be in the glasshouse, but I wouldn’t let them down anyway. He called Singapore and got no answer: five o’clock. They’re asleep, but I don’t want to be, though the only thing that would waken me now is a woman, succulent and willing and fiery, burning for me as much as I would be for her. It doesn’t happen unless you get her that way yourself, though I know Pauline was marvellous, when I’ve got the heart to think back clear enough, adept and full of love when both of us were properly wanted. Well, I could read for a while, but what’s the use of reading a book? They lull you into a false sense of security, as Len Knotman says.

His head went down on the desk, and in half a minute he was walled-up in sleep.

Morse came marvellous and sudden-quick, a circular saw out of some rip-roaring operator fresh on the job, singing into the earphones still noosed around Brian’s neck and waking him. Sunlight cut under the hut door like the flame of a blow-lamp, a knife-glare that swamped his brain and pinned him to the foul interior air. Only the morse was clear, piercing beyond tiredness and cold sweat, and without thought he wrote it in the log, ran fingers through untidy hair as other notes jerked into the mêlée at varying scales and strengths. Stations were tuning up, filling the wavelength with staccato importunate utterings of good morning — as if every operator had smelt sunlight at the same time, or sat at his key only waiting for the first one to tap out his call sign before taking a running-jump in with his own rhythmical identity.

He fastened the door open. Sun, visible above palmtops, pushed an ache of sleep back into his eyes, flooding warmth over him. Long-poled, sparsely set trees stretched thickly to jungle on mountainsides still purple in morning light, while clouds from seaward cast islands of shadow along the wide black canal of the airstrip, leaving a whiter reflection in paddy fields already shimmering to the south. A Dak revved up at the control tower, gleaming silver and going slowly along the runway. It gathered speed with a great belly roar, turned and stood as if for a final indraw of breath. A green light from the tower eased it forward, and it was a few feet off the ground by the time it came level with the DF hut, was soon heavy and slow over the sea towards Pulau Timur, then swinging back low over the trees, heavy with supplies for some distant outpost.

It would soon be sending weather messages from along its route, so Brian set sticks over a copy of the Straits Times in his outside fireplace and dosed it well with paraffin, putting a match under the kettle so that flames exploded and hid it completely. He spoke by field telephone to the other hut: “That you, Jack?”

A yawn sounded in his ear: “Yeh. Making tea?”

“Just put the kettle on. I’ll put a mug by for you.”

Jack’s voice became clear: “Thanks, Bri. Be over in five minutes.” He lobbed spit at the fire and watched it do a quick-change act into steam, answered by the kettle throwing water from its spout as if competing against him.

He saw Jack coming along the path, an ex-collier from Abertillery, a slim-built, thin-faced youth whose grey eyes had been used all his life to the murk of his home valley and later to the dust and grime of the pitface. Often in the billet he would be lying asleep under his mosquito-net, dead to the world and dreaming maybe of his welcome in the hillsides, yet with his eyes wide open. “I’ve always slept like that,” Jack told him, grinning to show his uneven teeth. “Can’t help it, man. My sister back home used to try and make me close them, but couldn’t. And I didn’t fancy letting her stitch them together every night.” He carried the Sten gun slung high on his shoulder, every inch the bantamweight, dark hair curly at the front and falling on to his brow. He took great delight in the Sten, feeling twice the man as he walked out with it to the DF hut from his own post, advancing at the ready as if a black mamba might uncoil and strike at the grimy toes of his sandals, or a tiger slouch from the higher elephant grass bordering the monsoon ditch. Buying a box Brownie from his saved pay, he asked Brian to take photos of him holding the Sten like any film star on active service, and both admitted that the reproduction certainly made him look fierce and tough.

Brian slid a mug of tea over. “Get that in your guts.”

“Get much sleep?” he asked from the radio table.

Jack drank half before he’d speak, lolled in a basket chair near the door, and gave a disgruntled reply: “I would have, only those bloody dogs howled all night. It’s enough to send you to chapel. You hear ’em?”

He sipped his tea: strong, sweet, and scalding. “They didn’t bother me. I had to be awake anyway.”

“Considerate bastard,” Jack said. “All for one and one for all. I’d like to have one of them, though. Use its guts for garters, I would.” Brian took down a message from the Dakota while Jack grumbled on, phoned it through to flying control. “I would have taken a shot at them, except that the bastards don’t let me have a rifle. Think I’ll let fly at the officers, I expect. Not that I wouldn’t by mistake, though. ‘Sorry, sir, but my glasses were at the laundry. I’ll aim the other way next time.’ Man, what a life! You should ’ave brought one down with the rifle.”

“Couldn’t be bothered”—flicking an ant away from the sugar. “It was so dark I wouldn’t have seen it.” He hacked off slices of bread and cheese: “Get some o’ this. I’m clambed.”

Jack shuffled back to his hut, cursing the air force, God, and Winston Churchill. Brian swept up and cleared away the breakfast things, dug a hole fifty yards off to bury the week’s tins. Another message rattled in from the far-off Dakota, then Jack was on the phone: “Listen,” he said, so excited it seemed his head was in the earpiece of the receiver, “there’s a great dog, man, about fifty shakes from your wanking pit. Fetch him down with the rifle. My Sten won’t reach or I’d let him have a burst. He’s one of the sods that’s been keeping me awake all night.”

“Wait for the bang then. See you soon.” Sliding one up the spout, he stepped to the door. It was as big as a full-grown Alsatian, and not too far off to be winged at the first crack. He stood perfectly still. Its coat was straggly and white, had a long bony head and the noble face of a handsome outcast that didn’t know what was in store for it. Its eyes looked as if waiting for something to move in the nearby grass.

A perfect target. Maybe I’ll scare it with a shout and get him on the run. He lined foresight and backsight with its right eye and eased on the safety-catch, feeling for the trigger. The dog turned and there was no fear in its gaze, as if it didn’t realize that another animal was so close, though Brian knew it saw him, felt its curiosity and quiet enquiring surprise. His finger was on the rounded steel of the trigger, and he visualized it already with a hole battered into its skull, fallen like a piece of floorcloth after the butt had jerked against his shoulder. He brought the gun down.

The dog moved, and with no thoughts left, Brian followed it into the grass, leaving the radio to fend for itself. A sudden spurt put the dog out of range. He felt the sun pushing at the back of his neck and impelling him towards the trees. A hundred yards off, the dog leapt into the air: I should have got it then — but when he reached where the dog had jumped, his legs and shorts were ripped by barbed wire concealed in the grass, paining as if burning embers had peppered his flesh. He aimed and fired, but the grass obscured his aim. I’ll get it on the dispersal clearing. Stop, he told himself, leave it be, you lousy bastard. Yet he was enjoying the chase, couldn’t force himself to draw off.

Concealed roughage below the waving grass blades buckled his ankle now and again and, falling behind, he expected the dog to wheel out of range and reach the safety of the trees. But it stopped from time to time as if sick, hoping perhaps to lie low and be given up. Brian went on, driven by pain in his legs.

The dog veered from the trees, circled back for the hut, so that all he needed do was wait. Maybe it wanted food. He whistled a tune until it reached the clearing, told himself not to shoot it, but was too weary to listen. On his knees he fired, the noise sharp and great, directly connected to the dog that dropped by the hut door. He circled the hut himself, feeling a black end-of-the-world weariness as he dragged himself, after some minutes, towards it.

In spite of the great hole in its head, which he couldn’t bear to look at, the dog still twitched. He dragged the limp relaxed body ten yards and dug a hole out of the stony ground, half an hour of feverish hacking and lifting because the sun was up and draining rivers of sweat off him. He pushed the dog into the deep trench and shovelled stones and soil in, hating himself for the rottenness of what he’d done. It was impossible not to think thoughts that wouldn’t come to him before but did so now. Christ, I shouldn’t have done it. Useless and mad. I ought to have slung a brick and let it go, not shot it like the cruel and wicked bastard I am. At the set another message came from the Dak, its signals fainter so that he listened hard to pull down the five-figure groups. Out of the biting heat his mind grew cool, drew him back a dozen years to a thundery weekend at the Nook, to a walk across cornfields with grandad Merton to look for Gyp, who was missing after a fearful kicking for nothing at all. The air was heavy with unshed rain and a cool breeze blew — as they tramped by hedges and over stiles. The picture was not clear, needed an effort even to keep it at this blurred pitch, but he remembered at the end of it finding the dog on the railway line, bloody and curled up after being hit by a train. It was impossible to say who had killed it: Merton, the train, God. Who? The family said Merton, and in this case, in spite of the phone call from Jack, anybody with two eyes would have said Brian had done it. And so would he, in their place. But never again, he thought. One dead dog is enough to have to pay for.

At eight-thirty the relief lorry waited at the airstrip, and Kirkby was on his way to take over, a dot seen in the distance as Brian stuffed his haversack with towel and books. Sun scorched his hair and he could smell the sharp stench of sweat from his body when the breeze lifted. Far to the left was the paddy field where the old DF hut had been, though the flat expanse of rice shoots had no aerials now to break the monotony of it. The Chinese peasant guided his oxen through where they had been, and palm-trees on the far edge that had received the full blow of the last monsoon lay like kitchen mops over the water.

Jack came out of his hut and walked in step: “That was a good shot, man. I watched you bring him down. Smack! Keeled over, he did, just like that.”

Brian stopped to light a fag. “Listen,” he said, filled with rage at his own useless cruelty (a dog’s a dog: it’s got to live; even Dave and Colin would admit that): “That’s the last fucking dog I shoot, I’ll tell you that, mate. In fact, it’s the last thing I shoot at all. Christ knows why I killed it; I don’t.”

“Well,” Jack said, subdued at seeing him in this funny mood, “all right, comrade, man, don’t do it. I suppose it didn’t do any good, now you put it like that.”

“Too bleeding right, it didn’t,” Brian fumed. “Roll on the boat, that’s all I can say. This place is beginning to get on my wick.”

“It’s no good letting it get you down,” Jack said. “We’ll be in that steaming jungle next week.”

From watching Baker test his model aeroplane (fuselage and wings were smashed on the second flight, though the engine was saved), Brian saw a letter on his bed bearing a Singapore postmark. It was a note from Mimi, not exactly filled with words of love, but merely saying she was on her way back from Singapore (stopping at KL to visit her parents) to take up her old job at the Boston. Yet because her words were unadorned, his imagination flamed with possibilities, set him cursing at the fact that in only a few days he would be off to climb Gunong Barat. He reflected, though, that such a life of expectation and promise, enabling him to see Mimi for a few days and then make a trip into the jungle, wasn’t such a bad thing. And a couple of months later he would be on the boat, making his way back to Pauline and the kid. He wondered why Mimi had abandoned the idea of Singapore so soon: happen the job hadn’t turned out as she’d expected. Or maybe there hadn’t been work at all, but she’d gone down on the trot with some boy-friend who’d taken a fancy to her at the Boston — who’d packed her up when his ship left. Then again, she could have come back because she missed me. Now you have got a touch of the bleeding sun.

That afternoon a dozen from signals stood in threes outside the admin office, being told by a sergeant (what they as wireless operators knew already since all information sent to the camp went through them) that they would be demobbed in three months. For some reason the short ratty sergeant gave a lecture on their lack of smartness, threatened them with guard duty, kit inspection, and morning parades, which they as wireless operators had so far avoided. Their great dread was that the air force bullshit machine would find its way even into this easygoing outpost of dialectical imperialism. “I like it the way it is,” Corporal Knotman said to Brian. “You don’t jump when I walk into the room, and I don’t jump when any other rattlebox shows his mug. They don’t realize that the war’s over, and times are no longer what they were.”

“And so”—the sergeant bawled from the veranda, a little man who knew how to have his own way because he in his time had been bullied blind — “I want to see signals’ types look smarter and be a bit more punctual. You were all late for this parade, every manjack of you, by four minutes. Four minutes is a long time in the air force and I want you to know that you must never be late again, NEVER! Understand? Not even for ten seconds. Now, another thing — no, I haven’t finished with you yet, not by a long way — I was walking through your billet this morning and it was untidy, scruffy in fact. WILL YOU STOP JUMPING AROUND LIKE A LOT OF BLOODY BALLET DANCERS AND HOLD STILL? That’s better. The beds weren’t made on time and I want you to see that they are.”

“Inferiority complex,” Baker grumbled, his lips hardly moving. “He’s like Hitler. A Nazi louse. I wonder where he’s left his swastika? ‘Lost, one swastika in Piccadilly Circus. Reward of half a crown.’ Blokes like him’ll be slammed in the gas-ovens next time.”

The sergeant went on to instruct them about going to England on the troop-ship: “You’ll wear full webbing equipment, with water-bottle and big pack, also carry a kitbag and rifle. All your surplus possessions can go into one deep-sea trunk.” He asked for questions. Brian could feel Baker seething nearby, like a dog-lover whose pet bonzo has just been trodden on in a crowd and is out to set on anybody with two legs. It’s understandable: it takes him a month to make such streamlined aeroplanes. Baker’s hand shot up: “What about our suitcases, sergeant?”

He let out a sneering roar: “Suitcases? Who’s got suitcases?” I wonder if he’s married, Brian thought, and treats his kids like this? Everyone put his hand up, and the majority vote rattled him. “Now listen to me, you can only take what’s on Standing Orders, that is, the equipment provided by the air force. All personal stuff has to go in a deep-sea trunk, crated and made to specifications by some wog chippy in the village. Any airman who wants these specifications can call at the orderly room after the parade, and I’ll be glad to see he gets them.”

This hit everyone, for all had suitcases to hold the growing volume of presents stored up since arrival. Brian had a dressing-gown for Pauline, things for the kid. Baker spoke up: “I’ll burn all my equipment. I’m not leaving presents behind.”

The sergeant seemed about to rush back to his office for the Riot Act. “Who said that?” He leapt from the veranda and came so fast into them that he burst against Baker and knocked him backwards. Baker recovered quickly, squinted down at him with insolent amazement. “You shouldn’t strike an airman, sergeant,” he said gently.

The holy rank awarded by the air force gave way. “Take him to the guard-room,” he bellowed, jabbing out with his fingers. “You, you, you as well.”

Baker was dragged off by his mates, Brian unable to decide whether he was acting or in earnest as he struggled violently and called out: “I’m innocent, I tell you. Innocent!”

CHAPTER 22

He remembered how on the long straight street of the housing estate Pauline ditched him one night: “I don’t want to go out with you any more. I’ve got a date with somebody else tomorrow.” Just like that; and even though they’d been getting on each other’s nerves, it was still as abrupt as if she’d prodded him with a hatpin or knitting needle.

“Go and get dive-bombed then,” he raged, and walked at a quick pace down the street to catch up Albert Lomax, who had just bid good night to his girl, Dorothy.

“That was quick,” Albert said. “Has she chucked you?”

“Don’t be bleddy funny,” Brian retorted. Then: “She has, if you want to know. Not that I’m bothered. We’ve been getting fed up with each other the last week or two.”

“You’ve been having too much of it, that’s what’s wrong,” Albert said soberly. “You’ve got to lay off now and again, not see owt of each other for a few weeks, then you wain’t get so bored.” Exactly what had been in Brian’s mind, but neither he nor Pauline were made for the mechanics of sensible separation. Too much passion was involved, and any letting-go would have to come out of hatred, not understanding.

Weekdays had been given to kissing by the back door, or sitting in with old Jack Mullinder over a lugubrious game of darts. Jack was off work now — for good, it looked like — because his foot had broken out again, was giving him jippo, he admitted whenever an evening passed with not much more than a snappy word from him now and again. To Brian it was a house of silence compared to what it had been, no fun with poor old Mullinder trying to nurse his pain without going off his head. He felt sorry for him, as if he were his second father dropped into a cleft of hell, and was moved to weeping one night on his long wind home through the black-out. Nothing could be done except take the foot off, the doctors thought, and that’s what it seemed like coming to. It was a miserable lookout when you dwelt on it, what with the war and everything.

On dry days of mid-week he walked with Pauline past the Broad Oak to Strelley fields and they lay on his topcoat behind isolated hedges, making love again and again into an intimate and speechless lassitude. They were blind in such darkness, unable to see except by the touch of hands against each other, which suited Brian down to the ground, though Pauline was sometimes irritated when his solicitude went on too long afterwards. “I can’t help it,” he laughed, “if my old man was a rabbit. John I was christened, not Brian — Jack Rabbit to my pals.”

“I don’t know about a rabbit,” she said, wiping herself, “but you must a bin born in a boat, if you ask me.”

“It’s so bleeding dark,” he said, “I can’t see a thing.”

“Stop swearing: wash your mouth out with soap, foulmouth.” The tone and volume of her voice were calmer than the content of her retort, the main fire staying in her eyes, which he could not see. Shocked nevertheless at her reaction to a plain truth, he stood up and took a few paces away as if to make the darkness thicker by being on his own. It certainly was more comfortable, and his rage at her temper went like the matter from a pimple back into his bloodstream and left him calm. But she hadn’t finished: “You’re allus swearing, and you never stop doing it for my sake. I suppose you think it meks you look big.”

The darkness was lit up, as if he had been smacked in the mouth — like his fight the time they first met. He wanted to walk off without turning towards her to do so — impossible because it was a lunar and dangerous landscape they were in, full of lime-kilns and abandoned pit shafts, wells and outcrop workings where one false step might cripple you for life. So it was better to stay and try argument: ‘“There’s nowt wrong wi’ swearing. It’s just words like any others.”

“It’s what they mean, though. You know it is”—not so brittle now she had forced him to argue rather than quarrel. Of course they’re different: all words are different. “They’re adjectives, I suppose,” he said. “It’s all right if you don’t mean ’em to be bad.” His back was to her, determined to avoid a row because she was plainly trying to head him into one. “Shall we go? I’d like a pint.”

“Yes,” she answered, “clever dick”—the word “adjective” still ringing in her ear. He shook his mac, as if hoping the damp would drop from it. “We don’t want to stay out too long drinking or we wain’t see dad before he goes to bed.”

Thank God I’m too young to get married, he told himself, helping her through the hedge. “Well, I’d better make the best of it as well because I’ll be in the army in a year — unless I can dodge out of it.” The sky had cleared: “A marvellous night,” he said. “It’s a wonder the bombers ain’t up, smashing the Jerries.” A year! What a nut to mention it. I’ll be eighteen, which is too far off to bother with. It was a mile to the pub and they walked arm-in-arm with only the crunch of their leisurely feet sounding along the lane. When my time comes I’ll desert, he thought, rather than leave all this. I’ll go on the run in every town round about so’s the redcaps wain’t know where to find me. There’s plenty o’ people who’ll see me right. Dad, for one. Aunt Ada, for another. Even old Mullinder’ll fill my gob with a meal if ever I need it. I don’t expect for a minute it’s principle as keeps Colin and Dave out of the army either, so much as not wanting to be bossed about and shouted at like dogs. As it is, they keep themselves by night work and spend their nicked dough on women in pubs, having the time of their lives, only dodging back into the black-out shadows when they hear police whistles. They’ve heard a lot of them in their time, though they never got used to the jitters of them any more than I got used to bombs and the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. It was so bad once when I went to Aunt Ada’s to have tea (they lived off the fat of the land, for there was a ham on the table as fat as our Sammy) that when a whistle sounded from the next backyard they couldn’t scatter fast enough. No bump came at the door but the whistling went on, low and frightening as if a thousand coppers had surrounded the Meadows and was closing in, but it turned out that the man next door had joined the air-raid wardens and his snotty-nosed kid had got hold of his whistle while he was upstairs having a Sunday afternoon kip with his missis. Everybody laughed when they knew: Colin and Dave bolting out of the house for fear of the coppers when all it was was a kid blowing on his dad’s tin whistle.

“Why don’t you talk? You don’t say a deal these days.”

“I was thinking.” She offered a penny for them, but he wouldn’t mention his deserting cousins to her. Not that he thought she’d give them away, but you never knew whether or not she might as a sort of joke mention them to somebody who would: there was a war on and you couldn’t be too careful because walls have ears and all that pack of lies. “I was just wondering where the planes were off to, that’s all.”

“That ain’t much: I’d want ha’penny change.” There was disappointment in her voice: “You never tell me anything”—as if after two years’ courting I’ve got much to keep from her. There was certainly more to his thoughts than he could make into living words, and he often fought battles to try and unroll the pictures and monologues that seemed for ever playing within himself on to his tongue so that she could share them. This happened during the first year they knew each other, when, as if inspired, his mind and tongue would now and again unite and he would make jokes or assume the life of some other person to make her laugh — Churchill, Lord Haw-Haw, or the Xmas Day Speech. But to try at a time when he didn’t feel like it was impossible. “I suppose you’d like me to tell you a fairy story,” he responded. “As if you was a school kid.”

“I don’t want you to tell me owt,” she said. “I just want you to talk.” They were level with the Broad Oak, but he was too full of rage to turn in, unwilling to enter such packs of noise and faces while their quarrel was on. And Pauline no longer wanted a drink. “If I don’t feel like talking, I can’t talk,” he replied. “Anyway, we’re talking now, aren’t we?”

A few feet grew between them, a space of live invisible wires that fused now and again like the flashpan of Dick Turpin’s pistol: “No, we aren’t talking: we’re rowing. We’re allus rowing lately, and I tell you I’m fed up on it.”

“It’s a lie,” he said, tongue-tied at her list of truths, “you know it is.” He was depressed, bitten by an indefinable blind misery. Maybe she’s got the rags on, he thought, and his mood lightened for a moment — until it struck him that she couldn’t have. The strong presence of a thousand blacked-out houses of the estate proved itself further by vague noises and smells — petrol, coal-smoke, and the vanishing odour of the fish-and-chip van. A gang on a privet corner kicked a tin-can into the road: it ended near Brian and he took great pleasure in booting it back at full speed, for which thanks were shouted. With a laugh he put his arm tight around Pauline and pulled her close. But her mood had deepened and she shoved him off.

“Come on,” he said happily. “Don’t get like that, duck,” and took hold of her again. Had anyone been listening from the shadow of some doorway, he would have heard the perfectly aimed smack of an open hand against an unguarded relaxed face, followed by a gasp of shock and pain: “You sod!” He would then have heard a second smack — as hard and resounding as the first — as Brian slammed her back. “No woman’s going to hit me and get away with it,” he called out, for she was already ten yards down and crossing the street to where the Mullinders lived.

At the gate she turned: “You can clear off, bully.”

“Don’t worry: I shall”—and heard the back door slam as he went towards a 16 bus stop.

Christ, what a thing to do. But the weekends were wonderful because on a Sunday afternoon they made love in comfort. The Mullinders would be out, visiting mothers or aunts at Cinderhill, Mullinder pushed there on a wheelchair (wife and daughters taking turns at the handle) and making the best of a bad life when meeting any of his pit-mates along the road, braving it with gruff gratitude when one dropped a packet of twenty into his lap. Pauline and Brian were left in the house, it being taken for granted that they would stay together now and maybe even get married when the time came. Brian sensed this but lived so completely in the enjoyable present that it meant little to him. He certainly never thought about getting married — not at seventeen, on the four or five quid knocked up on piece-work. So he was careful not to get her pregnant, put wise on how to avoid it by a pal at work who said: “They’re only half a dollar a packet, so you want to use ’em. Cost you a lot more than that if you don’t.”

“There’s nowt like a bit of hearthrug pie,” he said to Albert, walking along in the darkness. “I’ll get none o’ that now we’ve packed each other in. I don’t know.” The regret in his voice was plain a mile off: “It was smashing on Sunday afternoon in her house when there was nobody in. Went at it three or four times. Thanks,” he said, to the offer of a cigarette.

“You’ll have to get somebody else then,” Albert said. “It’s easy done. You ought to come to our club sometime. Lots o’ tarts there. It’s a Co-op place on Garfield Road. We play darts and draughts and argue politics.”

“Maybe I will,” Brian said, such a club not appearing too silly a place if you could pick up bits o’ skirt there. Like a book was all the more interesting if there was a bit of hot love-stuff now and again. “Come up next Wednesday,” Albert said. “Call for me about seven.” To pass the next mile off they asked each other questions on geography. “Can you tell me the names of the States of America?”

Brian could, or most of them, and those he couldn’t think of were supplied by Albert. When at school, he’d been surprised to see in a world gazetteer a reference to the nearby village of Wollaton, and from then on he hunted up maps of Nottingham, eager for larger and larger scales, hungry to find clearer marks of his geographical existence. Later he looked at maps in the headmaster’s office, pleased at seeing for the first time in his life that the streets he ran about in were important enough to be marked on maps that someone as far away as London could easily be gazing at. Then in a down-town bookshop he saw manuals of street-fighting for sale to such as Home Guards — meaning that every street was also marked and no doubt studied because of its military importance now. One such manual was mouldering away in the bookcase at home — forgotten after his first intense study of it.

The geography game didn’t quite last the mile, so Albert broke out into his undulating wail of “The Song of the Steppes,” and when Brian joined in — nothing else to do with such a noise so close — it sounded as if the Red Army was swooping from Matlock Bath and making for Nottingham’s centre, where the rich spoils lay. Brian wondered how it seemed to those already in bed. The song was long and continuous, coming from nowhere and going into an even darker nowhere, strong only because it was never-ending — like the Red Army columns that had paralyzed the Germans at Stalingrad. Brian was out of breath, but barrel-chested Albert went on and on, enjoying the power of his worldless song, staring dead-ahead as he walked and wailed as if the sounds automatically hypnotized his brain to make him continue. Brian had known Albert a few months, met him at Edgeworth’s Engineering Ltd. in Sneinton, which was his next job after the cardboard factory. Albert there had shown him how to work a capstan lathe, simple when you knew how; later taught him to set one up, which was more difficult; then to sharpen tools, an art Brian hadn’t mastered yet. Albert went to night school to learn engineering and math, wasn’t exactly an apprentice but had been promised a good and permanent job by Mr. Edgeworth if he showed himself as willing a scholar as a machine-operator. Albert had a flair for setting up a miller, lathe, or drill; could shape metal to any blueprint design, and his skill was always to be relied on; unlike Brian’s, which occasionally let him down by a sudden flooding-in of carelessness.

Albert, almost from birth, had been the handyman in his mother’s house, had learned how to mend lamps and fuses after only one shock, how to fix supports into the garden fence to stop it falling, put in a pane of glass or whitewash the attic — because his father had died when he was three. Albert told Brian the same night his mother divulged the secret to him, couldn’t wait to get it out, he was so excited. They went into the Wheatsheaf at Bobbers Mill and ordered two pints of mild. “Sit down, Brian. Mam’s just towd me summat I’d never known before. I allus thought dad had died of a bad heart when I was three, but you see, by Christ, you know what did happen?” The previous story had been of Albert’s poor dad digging away at his prize allotment garden for all he was worth, shifting heavy clods of spud-soil near beds of multicoloured chrysanths that stood high in the sun like white and yellow pom-pom hats. The picture was that Mr. Lomax, having foolishly overdone it when he should have known better, had folded up from a stab in the heart and died on the spot; but it was now revealed to Albert that his dad had really got fed up with life and cut his throat, altering the picture to one of a tormented corpse twisted among the support sticks of his collapsing chrysanthemums. Albert got more pints and drank to it again: “Just think, the old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man killed himself, do you? I wish mam ’ud told me sooner. Fancy leaving it till now.” Brian was glad to see him so happy, and went to get the next round. It explained a lot about Albert’s cleverness, and the vivid light in his brown eyes, as if the life that had been forced out of his father had joined with his and made him so much stronger.

Albert sang himself up the slope and over the railway bridge — out of nothing, into nothing — the noise of his primeval voice drowned for a while by the hoot of a pit whistle, but emerging strongly (as if he hadn’t heard it) when the hooting stopped as cleanly as if an invisible knife had slewed down it through the black air. He turned off for Radford. “See yer’t wok tomorrer then,” he called to Albert.

No wonder Pauline packed me up, Brian thought, after I cracked her one like that — and me thinking I’d never hit a woman in my life after seeing the way dad knocked mam about when I was a kid and remembering how I hated to see it. I don’t know. It’s rotten to do owt like that. But if you come to think on it, though, dad hit mam for nothing at all, just because she cursed him or said he was a numbskull for not being able to read and write, but Pauline gave me a big whack first, before I hit her, and that’s a fact. Maybe I shouldn’t have hit her anyway, but I’m still not as bad as dad used to be. Anyway, maybe it’s a lot worse to call someone a numbskull who can’t read and write than it is to give a bloke a crack across the gob for nothing. It’s anybody’s toss-up which comes keener; but I still wish I hadn’t bumped her.

Bert came home on weekend pass and Brian went out with him Saturday night to see what they could pick up. Tracks led by nine o’clock to the Langham, Bert lacquered up in khaki battle-dress and Shippoe’s ale, small for his seventeen years but also drunk by the success of his lies that had joined him up a long while before his time. “I can’t be bothered to desert like Dave and Colin,” he confessed to Brian, a chip on his shoulder at having to justify such action to his disapproving family. Bert had a mind of his own, had the same surviving face as when he was a kid, and Brian didn’t think for a second that any Jerry bomb or bullet could put Bert’s light out. He was a good shot and adept with foxhole and slit trench, wouldn’t starve because he knew how to live off the land, could sleep standing up, march forty miles a day, make a fire in three feet of snow, leap off a lorry with full kit and rifle at thirty miles an hour. “That’s how they train the infantry,” he said. “You’ve got to be tough to beat the Jerries, and if you can’t beat the Jerries you can’t help the Reds, can you? Can you, though, eh? We was doing street fighting in Newcastle, and you know how you get from house to house? You don’t go out of one door and into another — like a rent man — you use grenades and blow out the fireplace, then creep through the hole. I enjoyed that. We might be doing it in Berlin soon; you never know, though, do you, eh? I hate the cold, though, I do. I can stand it, but I hate it. We was on a scheme last January in Yorkshire and had to sleep out, dig holes in the snow to sleep in. Christ, I’m not kidding when I tell you, our Brian, I was so cold I was pissing mysen all night. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t hold it. I hate the cold.”

The Langham was crowded but they pushed a way through to the bar: Brian was good at that. “I can’t see her,” Bert said. “But she swore blind she’d be here at nine. I asked her to bring a pal as well, for yo’. I hope she does.” Brian was jammed front and back, kept his pint at face level above other shoulders, and was able gradually to tilt the jar up so that a wall of ale slid into his mouth. “How’s that tart o’ yourn?” Bert asked when Brian shunted a second pint across. “See much on her lately?” Brian admitted he’d chucked her. “Looking for somebody else then?” The pub was packed, generating a noise even louder than the machine shop he worked in. It was impossible to hear: “What?” he bawled, seeing but not hearing the second question. The loudest voice was that of the piano, beating its pathways above smoke and din, where nothing could reach to compete with it. A jaggle of colliers in the corner crashed out into laughter over the antics of their dominoes, a sound like the sudden splintering downfall of a wooden fence.

Bert nudged him, held up the other hand to wave. “Here they are,” he said, nodding at two young women pushing in from the doorway. Brian got more drinks, two pints and a couple of gin-and-its, while Bert latched on to the stoutest of the two women, as if, being smaller than Brian, he needed to ally himself to someone hefty in order to strike the right average should everyone be weighed out by pairs as they went into heaven. She must have been well over twenty, married as like as not, a round face and well-permed hair, not much given to powder and rouge but making up for it by the amount of laughter that rolled out of her at everything Bert said — which must have pleased him because it kept a permanent grin on his face, a low-burning light which seemed to say: Look what I’ve landed myself with. She’s a rare piece, ain’t she? Brian cursed to himself. Her eyes shone, showed by their life that she was having the good time she’d got used to since her husband, you could bet, was going off his head in some snuffed-out hole of Burma or Italy. “What’s your name, duck?” Brian asked.

“Rachel.”

“Down the hatch,” he said. “That’s a Bible name, Rachel, ain’t it?” which got him a louder laugh than Bert. He called for two more gins and slid them over before the first ones were finished.

“Steady,” Bert said, thinking Brian might get on all right with gels his own age but that he didn’t much know how to treat grown women. If you bought them drinks the second they’d slung one lot down, they’d swill ’em off quicker than ever: you had to wait for the hint first, to keep things as slow as you could.

“He’s trying to get us drunk,” the other woman said, unable to laugh as heartily as Rachel. “It’d tek some doing,” Brian retorted. “What’s your name, love?”

A straight answer, as if she didn’t mind telling him: “Edna.”

Bert already had his arm round Rachel’s fine middle, like a kid embracing a jar of sweet biscuits. Edna was small and thin, well made up with rouge and lipstick and looked a year or two older than her pal if the truth were known. She had long curly hair and a well-padded coat — was so thin that Brian thought she might be heading for consumption, though the way she chain-smoked may have helped to keep her that way. Her small features seemed distrustful of the world and of Brian in particular, so that in odd troughs of soberness he wished for the knowledge and familiarity of Pauline. Nevertheless it was good to be in a pub, half-pissed with a grown woman who at last was beginning to smile and give him the glad-eye now and again. He held the bridgehead at the bar, passing over gin and beer and cigarettes: soldier Bert was moneyless, and women didn’t pay, so money-man lashed out, one half of him not thinking about it and the other half glad to be the fountainhead of so much benevolence. Bert was telling both women that Brian his cousin had a cupboardful of books at home as well as a stack of maps for following up the war, and Brian turned to deny this and make out that Bert was spinning a tale just for the fun of it. “He says owt to keep the party going,” he told Edna, squeezing her thin waist, but then relaxing his grip for fear he should snap her in two and get hung for murder. Booze was clouding his eyes, and he was glad when “Time” was bawled because he didn’t want to be dead-helpless by the time he got Edna in bed or against a wall, and in any case by ten he’d only that many shillings left, half of which slid away on the last order allowed after towels had been put on.

They linked arms and made their way with “Roll Out the Barrel” to the bus stop. Bert was half asleep while the bus crawled into town and only woke up loud and clear when Brian tried to kiss Rachel as well as Edna. Bert pushed him away and they poured on to the Slab Square pavement where the bus route ended. Edna lived at Sneinton and Rachel in the Meadows, so the foursome split up.

A cold mist cleared the fumes from Brian’s eyes, his body light, though more controllable. He kept a tentacle well-placed around Edna’s waist as they walked and was not afraid of snapping her in two any more. In fact, she gripped tight as well, which made him hope he was in for something good. The streets were empty except for an occasional mob of swaddies making for the NAAFI or YM. They went in a silence of loving expectation past the Robin Hood Arms and turned up Sneinton Dale. He wanted to ask whether she was married and had any kids, but didn’t because he sensed she’d get ratty and wouldn’t answer. A solitary drunk pushed into them and Brian swung to shove back, but Edna dragged his arm and asked him not to be a fool — which was the most definite thing she’d said all evening. They entered a long street of small houses. “You live here?”

She stopped by one. “Just here.”

“Can I come in then?”

“You’d better not. My husband’s at home.”

“I can’t see any lights on.”

“Wise guy,” she answered, which retort made him wonder how many Yanks she’d been with, and brought up the hope that he wouldn’t get a dose of the pox. She leaned by the door and he pressed in for a kiss, whispering: “Let’s go up Colwick Woods.”

“I can’t, duck. It’s eleven. It’s late.” He enjoyed the kisses, for she clung to him and allowed his insistent leg to force hers open. “It wain’t tek long.”

“I’m sorry, love, I’ve got to go.” But she didn’t pull away, though she pushed his hand gently down when it went too close. “My husband’ll come out.”

“I don’t care. Come for a stroll to the end of the street.” Someone was walking up the entry, but she seemed not to have heard. “You will if he catches you. Anyway, I’ll get it, not you. Stop undoing my coat, it’s cold.” They buried themselves into another kiss. The stillness and force of their close-pressed kisses drew a haze over him and he felt himself on the razor’s edge of luck, either about to get what he wanted or be sent off alone up the empty street. But he told himself that if he went on trying long enough, even against her quiet entreaties to pack it up, then she would open herself and give in. “No, don’t, duck. Stop it, there’s a good lad. I’d like to, but I’ve got to go in now.”

Footsteps sounded again from the entry, of someone soft-treading it out to the street. “Come on, Edna, we could have been at Colwick while we was chinnin’.”

“I’m going,” she said, irritated now. “I’ve got kids to look after.” A shadow stood by them, silent and oppressive. Brian noticed it, felt it must be that of some neighbour out to see if his kid was on its way back from the fish-and-chip shop, though he cursed himself later that this was the first thing he should think of instead of just running like mad out of it. A stinging hammer of hard knuckles hit him between the shoulder blades and he swung round, ducking as he did so to avoid number two, which missed by an inch. The man, unable to brake, lurched against him.

“Clive!” Edna cried, getting her information out in a fabulous hurry: “Stop it. Come on in. It worn’t owt. I’d only had a drink. He woks at our place.” Brian brought up the full iron strength of his arm into the man’s face before he could draw away, then hit him again and pushed him out towards the gutter, impelled to madness by what seemed the savage wreck of his shoulder blades.

“You dirty bastard,” the man said, and ran back at him. His fist came up and met Brian in the middle of his forehead, making it feel as if the skin had been pushed into his scalp. Words fused with the pain and starlit darkness of his mind: He’s winning. He wants to kill me! And with both fists ready, he grabbed the man’s shirt and felt it rip as he smashed at his face, then rammed out with his shoulders and forced him away from the housefront, hitting out quickly to give more than he got. The man stood in the middle of the street. “Leave her alone,” he cried, his voice wavering. “Get off.”

Brian waited with fists raised, though knowing that if he didn’t fight any more the man would be willing to let it drop. “Yo’ leave her alone as well, you daft sod. We’d on’y ’ad a drink.”

“Ar,” the man said. “I know y’ave. I know all about that.”

“Well, I’m telling you,” Brian said. He felt a loon standing with fists raised against fresh air; lowered them and walked off cursing his bad luck, determined not to rub the ache at his forehead until he had turned out of the street and could no longer be seen by the squabbling couple behind.

On Sneinton Boulevard, a wide dark artery of emptiness all to himself, he burned more with rage than the pain of his indecisive fight, could have pulled God out of the sky and given him a good thumping — though what’s the use when there ain’t no God? Belt up, keep calm, then you’ll never come to harm. Yes, I know, he thought wrathfully, lighting a fag, and it’s no use feeling sorry about Pauline having chucked you, either.