The Broken Chariot

One

Housemartins swooped to neat mud nests under eaves because the young were always hungry. It was unlucky if they didn’t trail back every spring. Last year none came, and her mother had died, though in their innocence they were not to be blamed.

Maud looked on with pleasure, fascinated by such graceful devotion, pale and vibrant bellies in curving flight again and again above the window. She could almost hear the sound they made in their passage through the air. It was industry of a Darwinian sort, and the fact that they would still search out the house when all who lived in it were dead was merely a reflection on countryside life.

The gilt-bordered mirror above the fireplace reflected her straight nose and blue eyes, and she did not know whether she liked what was there, though wasn’t disturbed that no alternative could be expected. The lines of her mouth showed a determined spirit that had so far found little to brace itself against.

At twenty-one she was tall and robust, with a fine sweep of brown hair descending along both sides of marble-smooth skin. Such a pre-Raphaelite profile had the usual masculine aspect that put off most men except the weakest and those — given her congenital sense of self-preservation — could never be interesting.

The eldest of four daughters from an East Anglian clerical family, her father had wanted a first born son and, rather than not forgive her for having wilfully refused to be one while in the womb, treated her as soon as she left the arms of her mother as if she was. For reasons which would have been laughable if known, she secretly enjoyed trying to be a boy, which pleased her father who, however, expected that she would resume her female identity in time to find a husband.

A year after his wife died the vicar gave up his rattling velocipede and bought a Daimler touring car. How the wish for one came to him when there were so few in the district was hard to say. Perhaps an advertisement in The Graphic or Bystander had changed from the sketchy drawing and become in his eyes a monument of colourful utility. Or maybe the death had been a liberation, and the motor a consolation in his grief.

The vehicle was brought over from Coventry by two men in long pale dust coats one Thursday morning, and they sat in the study with a satchel of papers, a bottle of Sandeman sherry, and a packet of cigars on the table. The pony was sold, its cart hauled through the orchard by the gardener and left to decay in the paddock.

Maud turned from the mirror and saw her father’s surprising acquisition on the gravelled space before the front door of the rectory. The book fell closed, her place in The Old Wives’ Tale lost at the sight of what couldn’t come to life without human hands to move it, the strange agglomeration between four wheels calling to her as if every metal part was magnetized.

After several slow pacings around the pristine machine she knelt to peer at its inner mechanisms, stroked the tasteful leather seats, opened the tool box, dipped her fingers in the petrol container, tried its perfectly fitting doors, ran a hand along the sturdy mudguards, and felt an insane wish to put her lips to the steering wheel. The whiff of oil and fuel excited her, the whole lovely beast in tune with her heart and her future perceptions of the world. A friendly hand at the shoulder signified her father’s gratitude for such approval. ‘I’ve always wanted one,’ he said, ’and we can certainly afford it.’

She had regarded him as a cheerful bigot, but should have known he was prone to accept more items related to the changing world since having a telephone installed. She asked if he would call the garage in Yarmouth, for someone to come and show her how to drive about the grounds. She sensed he was half afraid of what might become a Trojan horse brought into his household, and was surprised when he agreed.

In a few weeks she was taking him on excursions to his favourite Norfolk places, becoming more and more competent with each meandering circuit. He took great pains, with a tinge of malice, she thought, in fussing with the map to choose parallel routes and keep her from the better roads on which he said she drove too fast. Yet she noted the faint pleasure in his fear when, along the occasional straight stretch, she wondered at her reckless dishonesty on topping the twenty mile an hour limit.

The sandy highway south of Yarmouth, scattered with loose stones, laid traps for cartwheels and the vulnerable tyres of automobiles. Inclement rain increased the peril and the motor, of which she felt herself the captain, stalled by a hedge. At steam clouding out of the radiator her father went into a spinsterish panic — though she wouldn’t dare tell him so — not knowing whether to go for help and leave her at the mercy of straying wayfarers, or send her on alone to face the danger of ambush by uncouth holiday-makers from London while he guarded the machine. He need not have worried, for Maud in her leather driving coat, hat and goggles, could stare down any potential molester.

They sat in the high seats, taut and silent with indecision, she unwilling to speak, and wondering if her father ever would. A light rain drove against them, and with it over the sandbank came a line of men in khaki, advancing towards the road in skirmishing order. ‘We’ve been for a swim in the sea,’ the young officer with his platoon of Territorials explained.

‘Must have been cold,’ Maud said.

‘Freezing, actually,’ he laughed. Seeing their plight he and his men piled arms and thought it unusually good fun to manoeuvre the motor towards the town. Maud suppressed her chagrin so as to enjoy the encounter, and honour was appeased when after half a mile the handsome young officer suggested that his men empty their regulation water bottles into the radiator, so that she was able to drive the car at little beyond walking pace to the garage, where a mechanic was soon labouring over the trouble.

‘Hugh Thurgarton-Strang.’ The dark-haired lieutenant gave his card to the vicar. Maud noted how he had studiously taken in the situation, as well as his easy confidence and humour, unlike the waffling young men she sometimes met with. She also saw that he was taller, which few men were, and how impressed he was with her presence and the proud way she had looked at the landscape, pretending not to notice any of his qualities, hat in hand and hair blowing about her face.

The vicar, who thought it his best adventure for years, asked Thurgarton-Strang to tea at the Queen’s Hotel. ‘It’s just along the road,’ and promised a pint of beer for each of his men at the neighbouring public house.

‘Sorry, sir.’ Thurgarton-Strang refolded his map into a neat calico case. ‘I’d jolly well like to, but we can’t stop now. We have to surround Blue Force by morning.’

Maud’s invariable response to her sisters from then on, when she was asked to do something, was a shake of the head, and laughter as she replied: ‘Can’t do it. So sorry. Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’ a new catch phrase in the family which recalled the young man’s intelligent and amusing features.

She became adept at learning from such breakdowns. Fitting the spare wheel with jack and spanner after a puncture passed an enjoyable half hour. Every part of the frame and engine fascinated her by the obvious way each could be put together if she looked long enough at the manual. After a while she was allowed to drive her sisters to the beach at Cromer.

She waited every Tuesday for the Financial Times because Mr W. G. Aston, the well-known motor expert, wrote an article and responded to queries on the problems of the road. Maud wrote him a letter comparing the difficulties of fitting the bolt valve to ordinary valves, and telling what was likely to happen if certain precautions were not taken. She explained the problem cogently and with some wit, under the signature of M. Holt, so that Mr Aston in his printed reply assumed her to be a man, which both irritated and amused her.

A greater adventure for the vicar came about on Maud suggesting that all five should go on a tour to the Continent. They would drive around Flanders and Northern France, and visit cathedrals. His bald pate turned pallid as she spread a map over the library table. ‘We’re in the Association, and they’ll take any trouble off our shoulders. We’ll get the magic triptych fixed up, so there’ll be nothing to pay on the motor at the customs.’

The French drive on the wrong side of the road. What about petrol? How would they find their way? Foreign maps weren’t the same as English. Then there was the problem of different money, apart from the fact, he concluded, knocking the ash from his pipe on the dogs in the fireplace, ‘that my French isn’t proficient.’

‘Well,’ Maud said, ‘my French is all right, if I shout it loud enough,’ and she convinced him on all issues, though without mentioning the attraction for her of there being no speed limit: gendarmes with stop-watches didn’t hide like sneaks at bends in the roads.

Extra tyres were strapped on the footboard, the locker topped up with spare parts and sparking plugs. A leather satchel bulged with maps and documents, a phrase book with Baedekers and Michelins in the glove box.

Maud and her sisters stood on the top deck, and sang most of the way across the Channel, while their father was silent with anxiety and scepticism. When the car was swung off the steamer in Boulogne he suggested putting up at the Hôtel du Pavilion Imperial et Bains de Mer for a couple of days so as to recover from the crossing, but Maud was adamant for driving out of town. ‘We must do at least a few miles today,’ and they passed the first night in the Hotel de France at St Omer.

‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’ her sisters let out in their shrill voices, while Maud paid off the porters for taking in the luggage.

After a minute examination of the church of Notre Dame they struck south for Amiens, so that the vicar could read his Ruskin in the cathedral. ‘You’re the captain of the ship,’ her happy father said a few days later, ‘so we’ll go to Beauvais and then to Reims,’ at which place she stood on the pavement to take off her dust coat and said to herself: ‘Not another blasted cathedral!’

After a round of the ecclesiastical gems of Belgium they were rewarded at the end of their three-week tour by a few days at Ostend. The girls drank coffee and ate ices in the cafés, and made fun of common tourists coming off the boat from Dover, while the vicar, between walks up and down the beach, sat in the hotel lounge collating his notes.

When war began in 1914 Maud put on coat and goggles, and drove to Norwich, giving a lift to half a dozen volunteer soldiers on the way. Her experience and mechanical skill left no alternative, she said, but to enrol in an ambulance unit, but she fumed and brooded when no one wanted her, or she was sent from place to place, and felt herself sinking into an impossibly complicated maze of offices and organizations.

In six months she was driving an ambulance in France. From dressing stations near the front line to base hospitals she transported her cargoes of pain and misery, and sometimes death, and wept inwardly at the awful tribulations of the wounded, and swore with the sulphurous colour of any trooper at whoever mishandled them in or out and made their plight worse. A staff officer wanted to marry her, but she believed in love at first sight, deciding it was better to live an old maid than fall prey to whoever had the same idea.

She refused work in the administration of the ambulance service because it would take her away from motors, in spite of the hardship and the miserable squalor of stoppages on broken rainswept roads. In October 1918, resting one morning between goes at the starting handle, she recognized Colonel Thurgarton-Strang. His horse drank at a village trough, and when he mounted, his dressage was perfect. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she called, above the boom and crack of distant gunfire. ‘Yarmouth, when my father’s car broke down. Long time ago, now. Don’t suppose you recollect.’

He saluted and smiled. ‘Of course I remember. Always hoped I’d see you again.’

‘Well, now you have.’

‘I’m astounded and delighted.’

‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’

‘We most certainly will!’

They laughed together, then he led his battalion of mainly eighteen-year-olds towards the German rearguards, whose machine gunners could not prevail against his enthusiastic young, who knew nothing of muddy stalemates in the Salient or on the Somme.

They met on the Rhine six months later, and Maud realized his place in her heart since their first encounter. ‘You’ve hardly been out of my mind,’ she said. They strolled the balcony of the hotel at Bad Godesburg while the orchestra played the old familiar tunes in the dining room. Maud smoked a cigarette, and Hugh took her statement as flattery, thinking that you ought not to believe a woman when she said something good about you. ‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to believe you.’

She put a hand on his. ‘I never say anything I don’t mean. I wouldn’t know how.’

All he wanted was to be the husband of this delightful woman. ‘I’m quite sure’, he told her, ‘that I shall love you forever — if you’ll have me.’

They were married at St Mary’s-All-Alone by an ex-chaplain uncle of Maud’s, the ceremony as much a regimental as a Christian affair, with an arbour of glistening swords to walk under, and so many dress uniforms that to Maud the gathering seemed like a scene of peace after a rabid and pyrrhic war.

In India the Thurgarton-Strangs avoided the oven heat of the plains by renting a house in Simla, living in a style helped by Maud’s thousand a year on the death of her father. Hugh expected their first child to be a girl, given the family from which Maud had come. This would not have disappointed him, but the dark-haired ten-pound baby, sound in wind and limb, was a gift for both, and they were pleased that he was stoical enough to make no sound at the font when he was christened. Their happiness was so intense — undeserved and precarious, they sometimes felt — that they could not resist doting on Herbert who, being new to the world, and having nothing to compare it with, thought such treatment normal.

His earliest memory was of being pushed in a large coach-like perambulator by a uniformed ayah along a track flanked by poplars. The continual trot of horses going to the polo ground was counterpointed by monkeys and birds performing an opera in the Annandale gardens. Above his cot he heard the clatter of raindrops on rhododendrons, violent splashes suppressing the voices of birds, and even his own when he gurgled for his nurse. Thunder gods growled among the deodars, then played to such a climax as seemed to burst the biggest granite globe asunder, sliced clean in two above the earth by a blade of lightning, which set him screaming.

The nurse was familiar with infants who were frightened, so he rarely wailed for long before she carried him — like a precious melon, Maud once said — to the covered terrace of the bungalow.

On calmer days, teething fractious hours, when he grizzled at the miasma of inherited dreams, his ayah laid him by the edge of a stream and, snapping off a hollow reed, directed the water from a few inches above, so that drops coming out of her home-made conduit on to his forehead with such gentle regularity soon put him to sleep. ‘You must have been too young to remember,’ Maud said in later years. ‘Or we told you about such incidents.’

He may also have imagined them, or they were culled from his dreams, the worst of which was of the nightmare meteor cleaved in half by an enormous blade of white fire. ‘The splintering of monsoon artillery,’ his father laughed.

Self-sacrifice was at its most poignant when Maud and Hugh took him to England, and left him in a boarding school which had everything to recommend it for a boy of seven except pity.

Two

The prospectus which moved Hugh and Maud to banish Herbert read: ‘Clumpstead, Sussex. Preparatory for the Public Schools and the Army, situated in a most healthy position on the summit of Clumpstead Downs. Climate most suitable for Anglo-Indians. Exceptional premises and grounds of 25 acres. Teaching staff of University Graduates. Latin a speciality. Rifle range, swimming, ponies for riding. Every attention given to physical development.’

No sooner was Herbert left — abandoned, was the word he used — than the description seemed to be of some other establishment altogether. As for the healthy position, the climate was one to kill or cure, autumnal mist preceding rain that swept icily in from the sea, and snow whitening the school grounds before any other place in the area. The rifle range was in the dead end of a sunken lane and mostly unusable due to mud, and the ponies for riding must have been retired from some coal mine in the north after being worked almost to death. The swimming pool was a hole in the dell, and physical development meant little more than running and jumping whenever no time could be given to mediocre lessons due to the masters being either blind drunk or in bed with a cold.

Most of the teachers behaved when sober as if children had been put on earth to be beaten and terrified, while the boys had only each other to abuse for entertainment. Herbert, controlling his misery, learned to hold the first at bay by guile, and the latter by more violence than any among them could equal.

Apart from cricket, the only sport the boys were encouraged in was boxing, and Herbert’s instinct told him that subtlety of manoeuvre was unnecessary if you forced a speed out of yourself which no defence could hold back. They said he had a black speed, a devil’s drive, a killer’s fist, but the skill Herbert even so developed made his attacks deadly. A not quite matching adversary blooded Herbert’s nose but he bore on in, scorning all cheers at his courage, learning that whoever drew blood first was three-quarters the way to winning.

He loathed boxing, but endured it by making his opponent pay for the inconvenience, fighting ruthlessly only so as to get more quickly out of the ring. He discovered the joy of being someone previously unknown to himself, vacillating between imagining he would either murder such a stranger if or when they became properly acquainted, or accept him as a friend for making him feel better able to survive. Who he really was, or wanted to be, he couldn’t say, though he secretly liked the sportsmaster’s remark that: ‘You must have been born with the soldier in you,’ a quality Herbert showed only when necessary.

Putting on weight and height, in spite of the thrifty diet, made him less likely to be bullied. He began to feel invulnerable though without turning into a bully, which at first made others suspect him of holding demonic punishment in store for some harmless remark, which an unfortunate boy would not realize until too late was a painful insult.

Hugh and Maud, when home on leave, were unable to understand why he showed no happiness. He was heartless and faraway, even for a boy of eleven. Hugh put an arm on his shoulder to point out Firle Beacon from the garden of their furnished cottage, and Herbert moved as abruptly as if he had been touched by fire.

‘He was just being a manly chap,’ Maud told him, after Herbert had gone to bed. ‘Anyway, it’s his age.’

Hugh paused between the measuring out of his whisky. ‘I remember being like that as a boy myself,’ he said with regret, ’and would have given anything not to have been.’

She held his hand, that strong pragmatic hand perfectly in harmony with the eye of his sharp intelligence. ‘He’ll learn to love us when he grows up. In the meantime, my dear, we’ll make do with each other.’

‘That’ll always be so.’ He put down the glass to fill his pipe, ‘but it’s a shame children can’t realize that parents aren’t much beyond children themselves, in certain ways.’

‘I often wonder if I shouldn’t have had another child or two. Then we wouldn’t need to dote so much on Herbert.’ She recalled her feelings after his birth: No more of that. He tore me to blazes.

Hugh stood up before going out to close the shutters. ‘No regrets. One child’s enough with which to surround Blue Force by morning!’

The new blazer needed some name tapes, and Maud picked up the needle. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll take him to the cinema tomorrow. They’re showing Fire Over England again.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen it myself.’

Herbert was sustained by the hope of one day getting revenge on his parents who callously condemned him to a school which, without experience of any other, he thought was the worst in the world. They deserved to pay even for sending him home to any school at all. Having waited for him to be born, he imagined them gloating over the ease of his first years, then springing this deadly trap. What other explanation could there be? Everyone knew what they did, and if they didn’t the crime was all the greater. He evolved a potent fantasy of luring them to a valley in mountains as remote as those of Baluchistan seen from the top deck after leaving Karachi. The boulder behind the tree on the left bank of the stream was so vivid he could almost touch the moss. Taking an axe from his rucksack, he chopped them bloodily down, no pity at the look of horror as they died.

He wrote the daydream as a story, every stark detail sketched in words of fiery resentment, and the English master said it was an excellent piece of composition, though moving his head from side to side, as if in his experience he had read much similar work. Then with his tone laced by a threat he told Herbert to put it in the dining hall stove and never to pen such a whining screed again. ‘In any case, don’t you know, boy, that you may never see your parents more? There’s a war coming on. In the meantime, write five hundred lines for your lack of filial love. Exodus chapter twenty verse twelve first line.’

Thereafter the scene of carnage came to him less frequently, for which he was glad, because living the murder through in his mind had left him weak and ashamed, though the sense of injustice against grown-ups took a long time to go away.

When the Second World War began there was a change of teachers, and his school was evacuated to Gloucestershire. The buildings were an even gloomier pile, all the boys listing gleefully its apparent illnesses of dry rot, rising damp, and deathwatch beetle, wondering how long it would be before the whole lot collapsed and buried them in a mound of dust.

It was as if the war had been sent especially to enthral them. Sitting in the library every day to hear the six o’clock news was like being in a cinema, and Herbert craved to take part in the glorious actions being fought. He performed well enough in class to keep ahead of many, but his greatest interest from the age of thirteen was devoted to the Army Cadet Force. The khaki uniforms were made out of last war misfits, but with cloth gaiters fastened, belt pulled tight, and cap angled on, he found it a glamorous transformation from school uniform. Maybe soon he would get into proper kit, because the war was bound to be on when he was old enough.

At times of despair he imagined a gaggle of Heinkels skimming like the blackest of black crows low over woods and fields on a deadly track to the sheds and towers of the school. His childhood nightmare of a world exploding in two and falling to crush life and soul out of him was overpainted by a smoking ruin in which everyone was dead or half-buried except himself and a few cadets coming from cover at the end of a tactical scheme. They would work tirelessly to rescue the living, especially those he saw reason to hate, so that he could go on hating them; or they would nobly clear up the mess and scorn all praise for their cool bravery among the as yet unexploded bombs. But the only sound of war in this backwater of England was the occasional wailing alert due to German bombers straying from the main path further south, or the dream-like ripple of ack-ack in the Gloucester direction.

He and Dominic Jones were enthused by yarns of conflict and exploration in King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island and Sanders of the River but, above all, by Kim. Herbert saw himself as a district commissioner in some remote province of Africa, the ruler of an area as big as any country in Europe, sitting by the tent door at dusk while his native bearer set out supper on a camp table. Puffing at his pipe, he would see a range of purple-coloured mountains to be trekked through the following week, into an equally extensive territory administered by Dominic, a social and courtesy visit before coming back to his own zone for another six months, no doubt fighting through an ambush of rebellious tribesmen on the way.

They talked of enlisting into the army, as an easy escape route into a wider world. The war would be on for years, and give them time to take part in an almost abortive and bloody but finally glorious attack on the mainland of Europe as members of a do-or-dare commando unit. On their return as heroes they would be cheered. Dominic pictured them with caps at a jaunty angle, toting walking sticks, and each with an arm in a sling. ‘Let’s chuck in a black eye-patch for good measure,’ Herbert laughed, at comforting fantasies which, by their nobility of unreality, fed his spirit and made life easier to endure.

The first sentence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses — his favourite reading — stayed in his mind for a long time: ‘My task is to tell of bodies which have been changed into forms of a different kind.’

And into different minds, he supposed, because if you altered one the other must change as well. But what body, and what mind? Who gave them to us? And who the hell was it fixed me up with mine, I would like to know? Whoever it was had made a different job of him compared to the others. For example, he didn’t know, for much of the time anyway, what mind and what body had been given him, because the relationship they had to each other didn’t always correspond to how he felt. Even so, he could handle them all right because his outer casing of memory and experience was strong enough to let him control them, and would protect him until such time as he didn’t need either any more. Nevertheless, it was difficult, one might almost say a fight, but since everything to do with the world was fighting, and since he enjoyed fighting, he kept bleak misery away.

Such uncertainties were no bother when, loaded like a hiker and clutching his single-shot Boer War rifle, he set out on the five-mile obstacle course, eager for cold air after the rigid stuffiness of class room or dormitory. He changed in a few minutes from a more or less clean schoolboy into the roughest of filthy-dirty ragamuffins as he went over a wall with rifle and kit, hands quick at the nets for speed, a metamorphosis not described in Ovid. He crawled through irrigation pipes, then waded a ditch, avoiding the splash of boots into cress and frogspawn. On his belly under pegged nets he relished the soil whose odours recalled Simla so keenly. He crossed the broader stream by a Tarzan rope, ballet-danced along a tree trunk and panted up a hill steep enough to be called an escarpment so that he could only get to the top by cunning zigzags. A hundred yards more or less on the level between scrub and sheep holes, he wended through a zone of bushes, and finally up fifty steps before dropping a dozen feet into home base, laughing at the poor sap who broke his ankle last year, while Herbert with his big stride made the course quicker than anyone else.

He absorbed the mixture of art and precision in map reading, able with no problem to transform in his mind the diagrammatic scheme on paper to the reality of fields and woods on the ground. He seemed made for the rough-house of minor tactics, manoeuvres and field days, and even drill with its fuss of polished boots and drying blanco. Most of all he looked forward to annual camp when, whatever the weather, he and Dominic set up a tent and cooked their mess in tins over the smallest of fires — careful because of the blackout — by a stream inside the wood.

Whether cold rain dropped on to khaki serge from the tent lining, or moisture fell from breath and sweat after a day in dry heat being stuka’d by flies and midges, Herbert was relaxed enough to be himself and not who anyone expected him to be. At which times he wasn’t bothered by that first sentence from Ovid at all.

Nor was he when he manipulated the Bren, the Short Lee Enfield and the Sten, learning how to fire and pick to pieces and put them together again, hearing the satisfying click of symmetry from metal parts that fitted so perfectly into place. He got high scores on the range, and didn’t care that each bull’s eye at the butts winked at a despised face to be obliterated. By sixteen he had grown into a marker on which others formed their ranks. To pass his certificate ‘A’ (Part One) was easy, and made him the obvious candidate for promotion, so that he went up stripe by stripe to the rank of sergeant.

Problems subordinated to routine and discipline became no problem at all, and he couldn’t dislike such a life when there was none other he felt he could deserve, an attitude which gave him less problems to contend with. Tall and lean, he had the same dark hair and Roman nose as his father (broken after a harder match than usual) with Maud’s well-shaped lips and blue eyes.

Hugh’s missives from active service were short and curt: ‘I’m happy to hear about your attachment to the Cadet Force. Don’t forget that one day the army will be your home, so always let me know of any progress. I’m sure you’ll make a good soldier.’

In more frequent letters Maud, this time driving an ambulance on the Burmese frontier, told him to do well in academic subjects, and not spend more of his time playing soldiers than was necessary to make him a credit to the school. In the meantime she was sorry not to be seeing anything of him, but she was sure he understood it was all due to this blasted war.

Herbert also enjoyed days when the whole school set out in a mob on a cross-country run through brackeny woods, and by fields along muddy hedgerows where it was hard to maintain a sense of direction if you were leading. Keeping landmarks in view was good practice in going ruler-straight from A to B and not getting lost.

He wondered whether Uncle Richard, a retired clergyman who lived in Malvern, had learned the same as a boy. If so he hadn’t remembered much. The sleepy aspect below his domed bald head, and his black rather shoddy clothes gave Herbert no confidence in his ability with the motor car when he drove to the school one Saturday and took him to tea at the Abbey Hotel.

He smiled at the clumsy old buffer not being able to see much beyond the length of his car, during the sick-making twenty-five miles an hour along leafy and unsignposted lanes though it pleased Herbert in that at any moment a five-ton army lorry (or tank for preference) might speed around the bend in front and give a touch of real life to their journey as they clambered bruised and maybe even amused out of a ditch after being overturned.

Knowing how much his uncle enjoyed such outings Herbert felt no need to talk, and in any case it wasn’t done with a grown-up who might be shepherding only by way of duty. After every excursion the old man slipped him a quid, drooling and winking at how vital the odd sovereign had been in his own schooldays; which must have been before the Flood, Herbert smiled, relishing the added padding to his stomach which the copious tea provided. ‘Thank you’, he said, folding the lovely green note into quarters and putting it in his pocket.

For an otherwise blank hour of the week Barney the English master, who had served as a pilot on the Western Front, read to them from a Penguin Book called Caged Birds, about RFC officers imprisoned by the Germans during the Great War. Barney may have been one of them, since he related their adventures with such feeling, but nobody bothered to ask. Herbert borrowed the book, to go through it by himself, as if to memorize the cunning mechanics of escape. Dominic scorned such interest in boring anecdotes of compasses hidden in jam stones, and maps concealed between the linings of overcoats, or secreted inside cucumbers which were sent to the prisoners in Red Cross relief parcels.

Herbert was enthralled by the deception played by the grounded fliers on their captors during months of patient labour. Their plans incorporated the tiniest details, as little as possible left to chance or luck. Those who tried were the elite, and the ones who got clean away were the heroes. He finished the book in his favourite refuge of the library, then took down the large twenty-year-old Times Atlas and turned its pages to various countries of the world, but came back to the double sheet of southern England to mull over the place names and decide on what dot he would most like to be.

Parents who could spare themselves from work of national importance came for a quick look at their sons, bringing what food or comforts they could. To Herbert they appeared gaunt and miniature, out of place among the paths and high-up crenellations, people from the outside, another world.

Dominic’s people drove up the lane in a Vauxhall Kingston Coupé, an elegant vehicle admired and wondered at by all the boys. When his sister Rachel also stepped down from the running board the car seemed even more the right motor to call at their gloomy school. Herbert wondered where they had found so much black market petrol, as he pressed against a bush to view them across the V for Victory Garden.

Rachel seemed angelic compared to her squat, pimply, ginger-haired brother. Staring was not done but, unable to resist, and though his jacket was wet with dew, Herbert fixed on her peachy cheeks, crane-like neck, and tied-back blonde hair swaying between slender shoulders as she strolled along the path.

A year younger than Dominic, she looked down on him by height, and also no doubt in spirit. Then she spotted Herbert and, quicker than any lizard, pushed the point of her tongue out and back, forcing him to wash away the tide of crimson at being caught like a dismal snooper.

Schoolwork clocked the weeks along, time he thought could be better spent though he did not know how or in what place. Rachel’s face glowed in front of his eyes, a phantom to induce restlessness and longing, which detached him further from a system more oppressive than any German prison camp. He became less boisterous, even taciturn, which he supposed was due to something called growing up.

The precision of Latin, maths and history enticed him into high marks at every test, though he scored the minimum in French. Barney the English master occasionally praised his essays, especially a sparse yet colourful few pages on his reaction to the D-Day Landings called ‘The Taking of Treasure Island’. Herbert described a skilful campaign fought by the crew of the Hispaniola, gave them Allied names and armed them for mutual slaughter with modern weapons. The Hispaniola was a tank-landing craft, and Ben Gunn commanded the French Resistance on shore.

Barney smoothed his bald head, and tapped his artificial leg with a ruler. ‘Such comparisons shiver the timbers of credibility, but the imaginative exercise, plus the writing, keeps it afloat. However, in places there’s a little too much striving for Johnsonian orotundity — but, nearly top marks.’

A convoy of cumulonimbus clouds blackened a wide track from the hill in the west, and an autumn storm played over the school as they were leaving the sports field for tea. A cloudburst at the same time as the lightning sent hailstones like shrapnel to pepper the science sheds and make the lawns dance. Herbert paused, sheltering in the colonnade, and the sudden all-illuminating flash seemed meant for him alone. His eyes didn’t flicker, his firm gaze ready for another which, in his exhausted state after the game, lit his interior sufficiently for an idea to be planted and begin to grow.

A sulphurous explosion, synchronized with a bolt of lightning, shivered the windows, recalling the storms of Simla and his infant nightmare of a world divided, when the tree-covered sphere hovered as if to fall on his cradle and crush out all life. He could smile at such fear because the split had merely parted the bedrock of his existence and enabled him to see himself as two people instead of one.

The effect was to lighten the weight he seemed always to be carrying, though too many pictures went through his mind for him to pull out any that were connected, or even made sense, and he didn’t at first respond to the call of Simpson the games master: ‘Come on Thurgarton-Strang! Get a move on!’ Realizing that the name was his, Herbert sprinted after the others, wondering the strange thought as to how much longer he would either run when commanded, or recognize the name thrown over him like the disabling net of a gladiator in the arena. He laughed so loud in his strides that Dominic, trying to keep up, wanted to know what it was all about, and got a sharp elbow for his unanswerable question.

The Cadet Force did no campaigning because there was too much snow, followed by floods. An uninviting frontier of lapidary green lay between Herbert and the outside world. Even the birds looked as if they needed a tonic. Waterlogged fields beyond the trees made him shiver to look at them. His only diversions were trips with Uncle Richard to the Abbey Hotel in Malvern, and he afterwards treasured the pound note, which he kept in reserve with others for better weather.

The deepest gloom of the season was to be illuminated by a theatrical performance in the games hall, organized by the ingenious Latin master. Herbert joined the group to avoid the embarrassment of being co-opted, and fancied there might be some interest in acting a person he most certainly was not, on being given the part of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘I have to give a lecture by Phaeton on Fate,’ he quipped to Dominic.

His sky-blue coat was fitted together by the matron from old curtains, and the golden horned helmet made out of papier-mâché painted by Barney. A cluster of bulbs backed by a suspended mirror lit up the Sun God’s palace. Dominic, wrapped in an unused skirt of the secretary’s, was to play Clymene the mother, which part made his life a misery for weeks.

Herbert’s recitative, ‘as befitted a mythological character’ — said the dramaturge, designating his pompous self — was to be spoken with panache, a style which came easily once Herbert had been through the tedious work of memorizing, and learning how to fit in with the speech and action of others.

Transforming himself into the pampered and irresponsible Phaeton, he assumes a privileged strut when his mother informs him, now that he is grown-up, that Phoebus Apollo the Sun God is his father. After much boasting to Epiphus of his descent from a deity — no less — he swaggers off to the Sun God’s Palace of Light to be acknowledged.

Phoebus Apollo tells him it’s true that he is of divine origin, and Phaeton is so in love with the golden words, even more perhaps than he is with himself, that he wants to hear them again and again. His father, to convince him that he is indeed of a godly line, decides to prove it by telling him he has the power to grant any wish he cares to make.

Phaeton expatiates on the golden precision of time, and declaims on the Sun God’s control of the calendar, without which the earth would exist in eternal gloom. The only wish he could possibly make is to have a go at driving his father’s chariot of the sun across the heavens, from dawn in the east to darkness in the west.

Half-wild horses are already snorting and whinnying behind the stable doors and Phaeton in his eagerness moves forward to open them, but Phoebus pulls him back, while all the spectators of this mighty drama yell for him to do so. Phoebus regrets his promise. ‘Only I can control them in their anger at having to go, and stifle their hurry to get there once they begin.’

Phoebus argues eloquently that the fiery chargers, once harnessed to the chariot, obey no one but him, and even he needs all his power to keep them on course. He knows for a certainty that Phaeton, his very own and handsome son whom he has just met, will be killed if he tries to drive a vehicle for which he has not the strength, skill or experience. ‘Ask me anything but that, my own resplendent lad!’ Phaeton ignores such piffling appeals to reason. ‘You are a god, and promised to grant me a wish, any wish, and a god cannot go back on a promise.’ Phoebus is forced to relent. ‘As my sun chariot each day is driven across the sky, so Fate must also take its course. Oh Fate, be kind!’

Phaeton exults as the steeds are led prancing and snorting out. He gets into the chariot — bodged together from a barrow out of the garden but decorated with blue paper and silver stars. Putting forth all his strength, with a heart not constant enough for any possibility of fulfilling his task, Phaeton sets off in hope of triumph.

The first stage is easy, as the animals smell the heavens and the distance they have to go, but everything happens as his father had predicted. In despair he watches his son struggle with the reins. Phaeton cannot believe that horses won’t obey the laws of his dashing confidence.

Refusing to listen, they miss the signals, play wilfully and maliciously, zig this way and zag that, though Phaeton hopes they will sooner or later come to heel and take him calmly on. The struggle is noble and prolonged. Such half-tamed horses don’t like to obey. Phaeton fights valiantly until, disastrously losing control, the end is certain. Yet there is something in Phaeton which enjoys this part of his travail (played to the full by Herbert) even when the chariot is breaking up.

Pieces slew all over the universal stage, a small piece, a bigger one, then one wheel, and the other. The four horses of Phaeton’s apocalypse spiral across the sky to leave a wake of appalling destruction among the planets and on earth. Only when Jupiter hurls a sizzling thunderbolt and sends Phaeton to his doom is the universe saved from further havoc.

Herbert’s speeches turned Phaeton into himself and himself into Phaeton, as he willed the horses to avoid his fate. At one moment he regrets that Phaeton did not take the advice of Phoebus Apollo and ask for a different wish — and he thinks of so many now that this had gone wrong — yet he exults in the glory of what he had become, and in the catastrophe he had provoked, accepting the change from nonentity to immortal charioteer, though it had cost him his life.

Three

Summer went on tramlines, winter on bumpy tracks. Every day after Christmas was endless and onerous, classrooms pungent with the stink of mildewed wood and damp wallpaper. Herbert knew something was wrong, that the life he was living was no life at all, so that when daffodils along the pathways opened into cups of brilliant yellow he told himself in the cold showers one morning after a run that he’d had enough.

Dominic responded in the one sure way to encourage him. ‘You’ll end up in awful trouble. You’re bound to get caught.’

Days were dragging by so ponderously he knew that when looking back on them it would seem as if they had gone quickly. A spot of table tennis in the games room didn’t help. ‘I won’t be. I’d rather die than stay in this prison camp. In fact I have to go before I do die.’

‘I’ll miss you, then.’

‘Same here.’ His compass for the escape came out of a Christmas cracker, and though the north point took minutes to settle it would have to do. He stole keys to certain doors, and knew how to open windows which were supposed to be locked; in any case there were so many that not all of them could be. His bag of essentials was concealed under an evergreen bush in the wood, wrapped against the wet in an anti-gas cape purloined from the cadet stores. Eight pound notes folded in half thickened his wallet.

‘Can I come with you?’

‘Keep your damned voice down, and serve.’

‘I’ll be no trouble. Curse it, I missed!’

‘A person only has a chance to get clean away if he’s by himself.’ Herbert was sorry he’d told him. ‘Do it later, if you like.’

‘I’ll be no good without you.’

‘Oh, stop whining, or I’ll give you a bloody nose. Just remember me to Rachel.’

‘She doesn’t care about you. She thinks you’re stuck up. She wrote it in a letter.’

‘So much the worse for her.’ He put an arm on Dominic’s shoulder, then took it away in case anyone else came in. ‘Let’s pack up this stupid game.’

‘What about your parents?’ Dominic believed he was trying to live out one of his fantasies. ‘Have you thought of them?’

‘You must be crackers.’ He couldn’t find the right tone, so shaped his most effective sneer. ‘Haven’t seen them in years. I even forget what they look like.’

‘They’ll be very cut up.’

He certainly hoped so. ‘Serve ’em right. I’ll bump into you one day, I expect.’

Seeing him unassailable, Dominic promised to turn Nelson’s blind eye on his escapade, wished him good luck, and, fatuously, hoped they wouldn’t recapture him before reaching neutral territory.

Wearing plimsolls, and boots around his neck, he went after midnight into the headmaster’s study and found his Identity Card in the alphabetical file, heartbeats calm, steady fingers following his flashlight’s beam.

The main door, daunting and heavily studded, was unbolted, but even so he slid up the library window without it squeaking and went over the sill. Good field craft enabled him to reach the outer fence, where he used a rope hidden behind a greenhouse cloche to scale the wall in the best Caged Birds tradition.

Darkness made him feel more than usually cold, though his battle-dress was buttoned and scarf well folded inside. Under cover of the wood he pulled on his boots, laced them well, and put the plimsolls under his arm. He had counted the paces in from a certain post so as to find the bush which covered his few possessions wrapped in the cape. Picking up a dead stick to poke the cabbage-smelling soil he wondered why it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Such mishaps always occurred when you set out on the great escape, but cold sweat pricked his face as he prodded the soft earth in different places, and looked under all shrubs within reasonable radius.

Fury at his incompetence would betray him. There was no saying how wide of the mark he was. If you made one mistake you made another. And then another. To bolt without a change of civvy clothes, toilet articles, penknife, and Barney’s copy of Caged Birds would turn him into a cadet-scarecrow never daring to show his face. Luckily the school ordnance map was folded into his tunic pocket, as well as a few other odds and ends.

He stood a full minute without moving, telling himself that his exploit was now in the realm of real life. He was over the wall, but could go back if he liked, and be warm again in bed, where he had a dummy of himself made of pillows and discarded kit. Barney’s flashlight was dim, and he had chosen a night before he might think to install a new battery. Who, in any case, would dream of someone doing a bunk? He wanted to go back but couldn’t, because it was safer to push on. I’d look a right fool getting caught on my way back because I’d turned yellow.

Hang around much longer and I’ll be seen and recaptured. He returned to the edge of the wood, took out his luminously dialled compass, and once more measured the paces in. The moonless night was no help, since all the bushes looked and felt the same in his beam of light, already less brilliant than when he had set out.

Another navigational run in, with more methodical poking, and the stick tapped what he was looking for. A sneeze shot out that must have been heard for half a mile. Of course, it always did at this stage. He stood awhile, still and silent, holding his nose to stop another. Using his handkerchief to mop the mucus, he thought it exceptionally bad luck to be stricken with the full house of a cold on getaway night.

Trees and hedges were indistinguishable in the dark and, well behind his timetable, he used his compass to cross fields, his previous daylight reconnaissance only a vague help. The outline of a great elm took out the mixture of stars and cloud, made the night a deeper pitch of black. He paused to get a bearing, and the fluting bars of an owl’s beat startled and prodded him on till he broke through the hedge at the exact point where the lane forked. Exulting in his skill — and jolly good luck — all he had to do now was march half a mile by the cover of the right-hand hedge and find the main road.

To move without noise meant putting the plimsolls back on, but he didn’t have them. Another mistake. They must have dropped while poking for his bundle among the trees. Now his pursuers would have a clue as to the direction. Listening for the noise of bloodhounds, he heard only the wind which hid the sound of him knocking claggy soil from his boots against the bole of a tree.

Anyway, I’m not a caged bird bloke in bloody Germany, he smiled. I’m on the run from a rotten school, and they’ll never catch me. At the junction both ways seemed feasible. Either could lead to disaster, so he shrugged and headed to the right because the sky seemed faintly lighter that way.

After half an hour’s carefree stroll a lorry came grinding up behind. Daylight showed in grey patches above the trees, and the birds were waking up, so he would have to be more careful. Walking along the inside of hedges and going from field to field would mean making only a few miles before nightfall, so he thought it best to get into a couldn’t care less mood and nonchalantly put his thumb up for a lift.

An RAF corporal with a bushy moustache and big tobacco-stained hands helped him into the back. ‘Going far, lanky?’

‘Bristol, eventually,’ Herbert said.

‘So are we, right to the station.’ The man winked while lighting a cigarette. He offered one, which was declined. ‘You aren’t a deserter, are you? Bit early to be about. What’s in that bundle? Swag?’

Herbert pressed his tunic to make sure of the wallet in his inside pocket. ‘Good Lord, no. I’m off to Bristol to meet a friend.’

The corporal laughed. ‘A bint, eh? We’re to pick up some erks back from France. War’ll be over soon, anyway.’

‘I sincerely hope not.’

‘I suppose a lot of you young ’uns do. I’ve done four years, and can’t wait to get out. The Russians are near Berlin, that’s one good thing. It was on the wireless last night.’

Herbert had heard the same, and felt they had no right to be, because he still wanted the fray of battle, dazed by smoke and noise and not thinking of death or wounds. Draped with ammunition and a heavy machine gun, he zigzagged along the street of a German city.

But the corporal was right: it was getting towards the end, which for a while made him wonder why exactly he had broken out.

Sombre fields and hills beckoned him to the comfort and security of captivity, as he had supposed it would at this stage of the escape, but he smiled the unhelpful notion away, and only knew that he was hungry. The squalid bomb-damaged streets of Bristol put him in two minds about the war in Europe ending. The fact could only be good, though while standing in line for a wad and char on Temple Meads station he assumed that the Japanese would go on fighting for at least another three years. He might — and it brought a smile — meet up with his father in the jungles of Arakan. ‘Hello, Herbert! Good to see you. All right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Splendid. Now, we’ve just put a bridgehead across the river down there. Take your platoon over, and see that we keep it, there’s a good chap.’

He got on the London train before any policeman could loom up with a pair of handcuffs. Everyone standing in the corridor could be his enemy, but freedom belonged to him alone, as long as he looked as if he owned the train and had every right to be on it. Gloating at having outfoxed his pursuers so far let him put on his most superior and supercilious expression.

His only plan, if plan there was, had been to get to the nearest big town and then clear of it. With luck and intuition he had succeeded. Acting on impulse might make him harder to track down. He locked himself in the toilet, as his carriage wheeled at speed through the Wiltshire Downs, changed into jacket and trousers, and dropped his khaki rig out of the window just before Hungerford. Back to a different seat, where no one could possibly know him, he read a few pages of Caged Birds, which firmly bolted reality out of his mind. Time went as fast as the train, a dotted stream of pale smoke when he glanced out, as if denoting the uncertainty of his expedition.

At Paddington he went through the ticket barrier and into the welcoming noise of London with a group of soldiers. Motors and cartwheels brushed his heels as he ran across Praed Street into a luggage store. The grubby yet strong-looking case had belonged to a sailor, an RN service number crested along the side. He latched and unlatched it, felt the material and gripped its handle. The man in a khaki overall behind the counter wanted four pounds, but called out he could have it for three when Herbert turned to leave. His belongings fitted easily, which made him feel a traveller at last.

A ten-mile radius of built-up area was protection from the world so far unknown. A needle in a haystack had nothing on this, and on Edgware Road a sign drew him into the Underground. After a while he felt so much like being buried among the mummies of an Egyptian tomb that he got out and walked by Cambridge Circus to Trafalgar Square.

His packet of day-old bread unwrapped from a clean handkerchief surprised him by its quality, when in school they had complained of it tasting like baked mud. He sat on a step to eat, and couldn’t decide whether the lion on its plinth was sternly telling him to call his freedom a day’s outing in London, and to get back to school by dark, or encouraging him to look sharp and stir himself to move further away than he was already.

Flights of pigeons swooped for his crumbs, though few enough were left. A pall of exhaustion came over him. He hadn’t eaten enough, but it would have to do. When you had escaped from a prison camp it was dangerous to go into a café, and if he had to sooner or later that would be soon enough. He stood up, determined to go his way, a glance at the stone man with one eye and one arm high on his pillar who, he felt, would approve of his escape and watch over him.

Traffic was turmoil, people disturbing. He turned about and went into the post office to buy an air-letter form and zip off a paragraph telling his mother what he had done. She wasn’t to worry, but if she did, so what? such concern being her affair and not his. It was a matter of protocol more than filial tenderness. You always let your parents know where you were.

He carried his case up Charing Cross Road, wondering whether he had done right in sending the news. It was vital not to betray his whereabouts, but they were so far away that the letter would take weeks to reach what outstation such folks were holed up in. By then he would be somewhere else altogether. Anxiety was lessened by looking in bookshop windows, at the gaudy covers of bigamy and murder. He wanted to buy one, for a real adult read, but money was for food and train tickets. On wiping his nose, he felt a firm tap at the shoulder.

Anybody could outrun such a granddad of a copper, if the only course was to bolt. A Woodbine packet sent spinning along the gutter by a damp wind was run over by a bus. The constable was smiling, so widely it was a wonder his false teeth stayed in. ‘You’ve dropped your Identity Card, sonny.’

‘Oh, thank you, officer. That was careless of me.’

The old fool even picked it up for him. ‘Can’t lose your identity card, lad, or you won’t know who you are, will you?’

‘Not much difficulty there.’ Herbert gave the expected laugh. That bloody cold, with its runny nose calling for the handkerchief so often, had almost done for him. He stowed the card safely in his wallet and looked again at the cover of No Orchids for Miss Blandish set temptingly behind the glass, meanwhile waiting for the Special to turn the corner.

A mindless and happy wandering among carts and lorries in Covent Garden was ended by a violent splashing of rain. Horse piss was washed away, petrol fumes mellowed, but the wind was cold after rain, the sun fickle.

At the clarity of the air a sudden panic sent him back to the safety of the Underground, going down at Holborn and getting out at St Pancras. A shadow passed over him in the great space. He was threatened by odours of smoke and steam, wanted to flee but the street was even rowdier. What to do or where to go was the greatest problem on earth. The worst thing was to look bereft in the booking hall of a mainline station.

His heart thumped at the peculiar sensation of freedom, of having to deal with choice, take risks with reference to nobody else, lock into throngs of people who had a purpose and knew what they had to do. In a German town soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets might surround him any moment and march him back to the prison camp. At least you’d know what was what.

The cheerful scene, even an educational experience, told him he would be safe as long as he kept moving and appeared certain of what he wanted to do. But what was that? He could only say it was good to be in England now that April was here. Instinct, welcome reinforcement to his fix, said that other people were his best camouflage, the commoner the better, so he stood at the back of a queue and stayed till an army sergeant in front asked for a ticket to Nottingham. Why not? Herbert’s twenty-one shillings and eight pence was at the ready. Whoever will imagine I’ve gone to such an outlandish place?

There was a rush along the line to get on board and, well trained in games of murder ball, he forced his way through. A balding middle-aged man in spectacles glared as Herbert fell into a spare seat. Simpson had put the NCOs through a course of unarmed combat, so if it came to a fight he could hurl the weedy twerp through the window.

He was disappointed. A scrap would have been fun, made him feel less tight, though it wasn’t on because you didn’t draw attention to yourself when on the run. The pathetic man, a clerk most likely, folded his newspaper to read standing up. Maybe he had been wounded in Normandy and was now demobbed, you never could tell, which thought made Herbert give up his seat to a woman and her child.

He stood in the crowded corridor, back to Caged Birds, though the narrative seemed less gripping now. The train moved slowly through railway yards, and he was glad to be on his way, almost gloating. Let them find me. I’m safe for a hundred and thirty miles, unless we go into a river like the train at the Tay. Life was exciting, helped by the metallic thump-thump of the wheels. The only thing wrong was in being hungry, but that was also part of the escape. Dismal buildings bordered the line, bare bulbs glowing between in the partially lifted blackout. A man stood at one in his undershirt, perfectly still, as if watching every face in the train, like a policeman off duty.

What peculiar places people lived in. If he had to hole up in such style — he pushed a soldier away who was trying to lean on his shoulder and go to sleep — he might not like his freedom at all. On the other hand maybe he would be glad to live in such a room. He’d be glad to live in even worse at the moment, except that he had to vagabond as far as possible, go somewhere else after — where was it? — Nottingham, and lay a twisting trail to mystify and wear out the most fanatical hue-and-criers.

The market square seemed vast in the semi-blackout. But for a single trackless bus it looked like an encampment that had been abandoned to flowerbeds and low stone walls. Herbert wasn’t worried about finding a place to sleep, but knew he would sooner or later have to discover a niche into which a policeman was unlikely to poke his nose. His money was almost gone, and his gas mask had been left behind, though he didn’t think there could be any use for that at this late stage of the war.

Eight boomed from the clock above the Council House and it felt like midnight. On a further exhausting perambulation of the square, pausing again to look at the lions, those same old lions, he saw a pub, or rather heard it, the noise sounding as if the whole population of the town was carousing inside. He edged a way to the bar through a crowd of mostly servicemen.

Sixpences were draining away but he scorned to spend them carefully. Glancing at an old man close by, dressed in a clean blue overcoat, a cap and scarf, and with an empty half-pint glass by his side, he said: ‘Have a drink on me.’

The man’s look of surprise was more obvious than his expression of distrust. ‘All right. I’ll have the same again.’

Herbert, celebrating his escape from school, called for two, and along they came for a shilling.

‘Throwing your money around, aren’t you?’

‘Not particularly.’ Herbert refrained from sneering. Parsimony was the last refuge of — he couldn’t think what. ‘Perhaps I want to get rid of it. Anyway, it’s a great occasion for me.’

‘Is it, then? How much money have you got?’

Herbert wiped his nose, and explored the cloth caverns of his pockets. ‘Another two shillings.’

‘Where did you pick up that stinking cold?’

The whole damned school had had one. ‘On the train, I suppose.’ Colds were loathsome, only inferior types stricken — till you caught one yourself. ‘It was packed.’

‘They usually are. Here’s to your health, which seems a fair toast.’

Wasn’t there a line in Lullabalero about Nottingham’s fine ale? He’d never tasted anything so good. ‘And to yours, as well.’

‘I’m Isaac Frost.’ A frail hand was held out for shaking. ‘What might yours be?’

He touched the cold fingers. ‘Herbert.’

‘Is that all?’

‘For the moment.’

Isaac looked at him pityingly. ‘I’ve met some funny chaps in my time, but not one that throws his money about when he’s got so little.’

Herbert supposed that his lavish father would easily spend his last shilling treating someone he didn’t know to a drink, especially if he came into a place like this and met one of his old soldiers — except that he most probably wouldn’t set much store by this dive. He took his foot from the brass rail and stood full height. ‘As soon as I’ve nothing left it will collect my mind wonderfully towards getting some more.’

Isaac adjusted his glasses on hearing such pretentious nonsense. ‘Sounds a cock-eyed notion to me. And you’re a bit too young to be a philosopher. You’re from London, I suppose?’

Herbert had heard of coppers’ narks, and wondered whether he shouldn’t make a run from this noisy and exuberant den, though pride decided him not to. Either that, he thought, or I’m too done in to care. ‘Thereabouts.’

‘What hotel do you propose to put up at?’

Being laughed at encouraged him to more openness, whether the man was a nark or not. ‘I’m not on the run, if that’s what you mean. I’m seventeen, and want to get a job. As soon as I’m eighteen, though, I’ll enlist.’

Isaac was appalled at what the war had done to the young. ‘Why do you want to do that?’ A tinkle of broken glass came from further down the hall, and a woman’s scream was followed by such male effing and blinding as made Herbert turn his head, though slowly, to look. The smack of a fist on flesh sounded even over shouts and laughter, and a burly man in evening dress frogmarched a capless glaze-eyed soldier out on to the pavement. ‘There’s always a bit of that going on,’ Isaac said, ‘with so many women on the loose. And you know what soldiers are. But the doormen are very good here at dealing with it.’

Herbert turned to his drink as if nothing had happened. ‘The army will take care of me for a few years. I need to learn how to kill properly.’

Isaac laughed in such a way that Herbert wondered if he had asthma, knowing what it sounded like because Dominic had a touch of it when he first came to school. ‘You don’t have to learn a thing like that. Necessity will tell you, if ever you need to. In any case, who would a nice young chap like you want to kill? There’s been enough of that going on in the last five years.’

‘My parents, for a start.’

‘They seem to have made a good job of you.’ His thin lips curved even more in amusement, as if to say: who the devil have I got here? ‘You should be grateful.’

‘They packed me off to boarding school from India when I was seven.’ The laughter at some jokester further down the bar diminished. Herbert, not knowing the right thing to say, or even what he really believed before this sceptical old man, said whatever came to mind. ‘I’d have been quite happy staying where I was.’

‘I wish my parents had been able to send me to such a place. I left a hellhole of a school at thirteen to work on a market stall. And then I fought my way up, if you can call it that. Anyway, the best thing you can do is take my advice, and never blame your parents for anything. Whatever you think they did, it wasn’t their fault. And whatever they did do can’t be altered now.’

‘Really?’ Herbert hoped his attempt to resist an outright sneer would be obvious to the most imperceptive, or so Isaac surmised. The silly kid’s trying to seem more adult by blaming his deficiencies and troubles on his parents.

Two half-pints, and the ever biting famishment, not to mention tiredness, made him grip the brass rail to stay upright, while trying to show interest in whatever other rubbish the little man had to say.

‘I was a printer for much of my life. Now I’m retired, and live on my own. Why? Well, I like it that way, that’s why. I’ve got a couple of beehive rooms up one of those narrow streets across the square, and as I can see you’re in a fix you’re welcome to come back and sleep on the floor. I won’t be the perfect host and offer my bed, because I’m sixty and need it myself.’

Herbert knew he should say no, thank you very much, it’s awfully kind, I must be getting on, but he put himself into the hands of this stranger because he was too much starving and done for to know what to do or where to go next.

Stars spun over the sky; he looked at pavements and tarmac to get his equilibrium settled. ‘It’s not good to drink on an empty stomach,’ Isaac said. ‘Certainly not Nottingham ale.’ He led the way up the stairs of a damp-smelling decrepit building of offices and store rooms, turning from the landing to say: ‘I’ve told you my full name. What’s yours? And I don’t want an alias, either.’

The question signified a Rubicon that would have to be crossed sooner or later, a turbulent river for Herbert after his determination to follow the Caged Birds code of concealment, but he had blabbed plenty in the pub so he decided that a little more truth wouldn’t get him turned over to the law. Trust was laziness, a deadly sin, but even so he answered: ‘Herbert Thurgarton-Strang.’

‘One of them?’ Isaac worked his keys at the lock. ‘We’ll have to find you a shorter monicker, otherwise the blokes in the factory will make your life a misery.’

‘I’m not going to have anything to do with a factory.’

‘You’ll want a job won’t you?’

Herbert followed him into the small room. The old man’s brain must have been working overtime. ‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. Or I well might.’

‘You’ve got problems, and I’m wondering what to do with you. Anyway, Thurgarton-Strang, in the meantime, I’ll cook us some chips.’ He took off his hat, overcoat and scarf. ‘I’ve got spuds, fat, and a loaf of bread, so you won’t go to sleep on an empty stomach, which it looks like you’ve got with that bony face. There’s tea and milk as well but, alas, no sugar.’

‘That’s awfully kind of you.’ His speech sounded clumsy even to himself, as if he had landed in a foreign country with an obsolete phrasebook. ‘Very kind I must say.’

‘Kind is a word you don’t have any cause to use,’ Isaac said with a wry smile. The smell of paraffin, soap and dampness pricked Herbert’s nostrils. The old cove was helpful, but as domineering as a teacher, especially when he went on: ‘Maybe I succumbed in a weak moment in asking you to come back here, though I always respond to an attempt at generosity. Unless it was a subtle ruse of yours to treat a stranger to a drink out of your last few bob.’ He looked at Herbert, as if holding a new penny up to the light. ‘But I hardly think so, if I’m any judge of character.’

The walls were mainly bookshelves, with a table close up, and two chairs of the sort used in canteens. A second room through an archway, little more than an alcove, contained a bed and a chest of drawers. ‘It wasn’t a ruse,’ Herbert said, ‘I can tell you.’

‘Sit down, then, and don’t be offended — while I get to work.’ He filled a kettle and saucepan at a tap on the landing, and Herbert drew out a book to find that half was in a script he hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t Greek or Hindustani, but whatever it was suggested that Isaac, though only a printer, might be something of a scholar, and not so lowly and simple as he had thought at first. A smaller curtain in a corner covered his larder, and in a few minutes the room was pungent with the smell of frying. He must be lonely though, to do what he was doing so well, cutting spuds into chips for someone he had just met. ‘I’ve even got a pat of butter for our bread. It’s a lucky night. Every man should be able to cook, otherwise he’s no man.’

Herbert sat down to the most welcome meal of his life. ‘It’s marvellous,’ starvation diminishing with every mouthful.

Isaac ate daintily for a man in such accommodation, and Herbert saw the skullcap on his bald head as something to keep off the chill. ‘Which you are too young to feel with your black thatch,’ Isaac said, when Herbert politely mentioned it. ‘It may well be marvellous grub, but I’ll burn in hell, if there is such a place, for eating a mixture like this. However, necessity knows no bounds, with which I’m sure the sagest rabbis would agree.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘Well, my son, I’m Jewish, and this fat is not what they would call kosher, though I get it when I have to.’

‘Kosher?’

‘Ritually clean, to you.’

Herbert guided a piece of bread around the plate with his fork to mop up the fat. ‘Why shouldn’t you eat it?’

‘That — is a very long story. Very long indeed. You’ll have to bury yourself in Leviticus to find out.’

Herbert felt himself to be what people meant by intoxicated, and that the beer was responsible. He was also drunk with freedom and food, for on standing up the room seemed to be without walls, and he hoped he wasn’t going to faint. After being locked in all his life he belonged nowhere at the moment, no rules or walls surrounding him. Every nerve tingled with a mixture of relief and trepidation, but on the whole it was good, even better than he would ever have thought good to be. Acting out of his own will, Fate had led him to this funny old chap who for one night anyway had given him a place to sleep. What more did he need? He’d never had the chance to bump into such a person before, and all he had heard from his father about his sort was a slighting comment on one who had kept a store in Simla. How strange and wonderful life was! He sat down and said, as if to flatter him for his generosity: ‘I’ll bet you have lots of interesting stories to tell.’

Isaac laid the plates in a washing up bowl and set it by the door, in place of a steel helmet which he put on to a pile of books. ‘I used to look a sight in that when I did my firewatching. Yes, I’ve plenty of stories, and I might tell you one sometime. I won’t go into any now though, because as soon as I’ve done with this cigarette it’ll be time for bed.’

They sat as if silence was part of the ritual until Herbert, confident that Isaac was to be trusted, said he found it hard to believe he had left his bloody awful school only that morning.

‘In that case you won’t mind sleeping rough.’ He took a blanket from a cupboard. ‘Though I’ve slept rougher in my time, let me tell you. Spread this over you when you get your head down.’

Herbert unpacked his spare trousers, jacket, shirt, underwear, socks and handkerchiefs, complimenting himself on the forethought of bringing so much. He remembered the wet tents he had slept in. ‘I can hardly believe my luck.’

The response was a don’t-know-you’re-bornlook. ‘There’s no such thing.’ Isaac called from the alcove where he was changing into pyjamas. ‘Everything’s pre-ordained, as you’ll find out more and more as you go on.’

Herbert opened his eyes. Sunlight, albeit watery, came into the room. He folded his blanket with cadet neatness and cleared the space, feeling as if the awareness of freedom all through the night had doubled the intensity of his sleep. Waking up penniless gave him no worry at all.

‘Borrow this cap,’ Isaac said after breakfast of sugarless tea, bread and jam, ‘for when you go to the Ministry of Labour, otherwise they’ll take one look at you and make you a penpusher. You’ll earn a lot more in a factory, and mix in better. But watch your accent. Act the silent sort, as far as they’ll let you, and get a grasp of the accent as soon as you can. You’ll find they’re a lot more tolerant in a factory than an office. Another thing is that for a while anyway say yes to whatever you’re asked to do. As for your proper name, forget it. Tell ’em at the Labour that you’ve just left school and your certificate’s coming from Ireland where you were evacuated.’

He cleared the table and took out a box of pens and rubbers and inks. ‘Give me your Identity Card.’ Herbert looked at it as well, opened before them both. ‘This is one advantage in having been a printer,’ Isaac said. ‘I’m going to alter it so that Ernest Bevin himself wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘Isn’t it a bit criminal? I mean, what if I’m caught out?’

‘You won’t be.’ Isaac cracked his fingers to make the joints supple. ‘A little innocent forgery to fox the bureaucrats never hurt anyone. We’ll make your surname into Gedling, which is a district around here. Bert Gedling you’ll be, and a good honest name it sounds. If and when you want to join the army I’ll change it back for you.’

Herbert wondered if they still wouldn’t smell him a mile off for what he was, while Isaac sipped the rest of his cold tea as delicately as if it had stayed hot and sugar had been magicked into it. ‘Now where’s your ration book?’

‘Ration book?’

‘We might as well alter that while we’re about it.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘You didn’t bring it?’

‘I never thought to. And I could hardly ask them.’

Isaac’s shake of the head came from thinking what babies there were in the world. ‘All right. Perhaps it won’t matter. They aren’t too particular these days. When you’ve got your employment cards, and they’ve found you a job, go to the Food Office and ask for a ration book. Tell ’em you lost it. Or just look as if it’s your God-given right to have one. They don’t let people starve in this country. At least they haven’t during the war. So good luck to you, or whatever it is. I’ll let you stay here two more nights, in which time you’ll have to get digs. The firm you find a job with will lend you a few pounds to tide you over. That’s what they do for Irish labourers who come over. And don’t look so worried. I’m sure you’ll be all right.’

Four

By the end of the day Herbert had employment cards, a ration book, and a job at the Royal Ordnance Factory. The wages clerk in the machine shop arranged a three-pound loan till his first wages came due. On Isaac’s advice, he spent six bob on a second-hand pair of overalls hanging outside a pawnshop on the Hockley. His cadet boots would look right on any factory floor, as soon as the shine wore off.

‘I knew you had it in you, after the education you’ve had. You’re obviously from the right kind of family. But from now on, hang on to your money. Don’t go throwing it about.’ Isaac put the book he’d been reading back on the shelf. ‘Still, it’s good of you to bring these fish and chips for our supper, though you didn’t need to splash half a week’s rations on me. All the same,’ he fussed, ‘I do like a bit of sugar.’

Herbert’s feet ached from walking the town all day. ‘You did me a wonderfully good turn.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more about that, but if you really think so, pay me back by doing a good turn to somebody I don’t know. That’s what keeps the world a halfway decent place to live in. Now, enough of such platitudes and attitudes, and let’s get down to supper.’

Before any money came to him Herbert had, as it were, to work a week for nothing, though his landlady Mrs Denman said she would board him in the meanwhile on condition that he equalized the thirty-five shillings a week out of his four pounds wages the minute it was possible.

‘I’ve got to be practical,’ she said, ‘where young lads like you are concerned,’ putting the kettle on the gas to make him a cup of tea. ‘And I am practical, I allus was. If I hadn’t been, after my Will died, I shouldn’t have been running this place today.’

Herbert thought of her as Practical Penelope, though she was a bit old, being about forty, and he was to drop the nickname after a while because, for a start, she had no Odysseus to wait for, and no time for weaving. Probably no idea how to. Also, a man who was her suitor came to the house every other evening and, as far as Herbert could tell, stayed the night.

Her straight black hair was just short enough to make the face seem broader than necessary, but she had, he thought, a nicely shaped nose. A clean apron of sacking served over her white blouse and dark skirt. He also noticed her patent leather shoes which looked a bit tarty, the way they buttoned up.

‘I do all the work on my own, though’ — she pushed her glasses straight — ‘because I never did mind it. Mrs Atkins next door said I should get a man in to help. But no fear, I did have one once, not long after my Will died, and I should have known better because he was an idle devil who only liked being at the bookies or in a pub, so I got rid of him. No more men for me, I said to myself. Well, not like him anyway. I just see Frank when it takes my fancy, and he sees me when it takes his, which suits us both. But as for having a man in the house, not likely.’

Herbert shared a room with her son Ralph, who turned from trimming a flimsy moustache to hold out a friendly enough hand when his mother showed him in. He spoke with little of the local accent, which made Herbert, already noting the cadence, determined to take more of Isaac’s advice and say as little as possible until he felt easier using it.

‘Hope you’ll be comfortable in the other bed,’ Ralph said.

‘I’m sure I shall.’

‘Mother’s making all the cash she can.’ He was surprised that Herbert had so little to unpack from his scruffy case, and Herbert picked up his embarrassment at having to share a room, which indicated that he had been spoiled. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t let our beds to night workers while we were out during the day,’ Ralph went on. ‘She hopes to get a boarding house at Skegness after the war. Poor mother doesn’t realize it might go on forever.’

‘Who lives in the rest of the house?’

‘Four other lodgers.’

‘What do they do?’

Ralph pulled a comb through fair wavy hair. ‘A couple, both men, if you know what I mean. They work in a drawing office, very hush-hush, they tell us, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t design bottle tops. The other two come and go at all hours, and I think they dabble in black market, which means we have bacon and butter for our breakfast more often than most, or at least I do.’

His nose turned up even more when Herbert mentioned the factory he was to work at, Ralph saying that he went to business at the office of the local bus depot — probably counting tickets all day, Herbert thought. Because of flat feet, and no doubt a few more shameful ailments, Ralph hadn’t been called up — an even worse fate — though at twenty he was lucky no impediments showed.

Herbert asked about the bathroom, but it wasn’t that kind of house. Mrs Denman promised to get one in as soon as the war ended. Meanwhile they could wash at the kitchen sink, and a pot under each bed saved them running down three flights of stairs and across the back yard at night. Two small wardrobes took care of their clothes. Herbert smiled: a hook and a coat hanger on the back of the door would have done for him. There was even a rickety dressing table against the wall to put things on. He’d never felt so well off.

On day three of his escape the noise as he walked into the machine shop at the Royal Ordnance Factory seemed likely to push him straight back on to the road. He shouted his question as to where the chargehand was, and barged courageously along the main gangway towards him. ‘I don’t know what job to give yer, but foller me and we’ll find one. There’s allus summat.’

Motors, dynamos and donkey engines, flapping powerbelts, the screech of steel being cut, and tools sharpening on Carborundum wheels shook his eardrums and made him want to close his eyes. He didn’t know how they could talk to each other, never mind exist for more than a few minutes in this vast extension to the forge of Vulcan. Hand signals and grunts sufficed for the carrying on of work, an advantage in that he didn’t have much call to open his mouth in a way that would show his posh accent.

Archie Bleasby, a burly six footer of his own age, worked on a lathe, and sat next to him on a box of castings at tea break. ‘What did yer want ter cum and wok on a fuckin’ tip like this for?’

The machinery still ran, and Herbert put his ear close as he bit a gap into his potted-meat sandwich, his mouth conveniently full. ‘Munny,’ using a pronunciation of money heard from Mrs Denman. The reply satisfied Archie, who was also disinclined to waste much breath on chat except: ‘I don’t know whether yer’ve cum to the right place for that, Bert.’

So Bert he was, and must know himself to be, if he wanted to be absorbed into the shop, which seemed to be happening because, on going into the canteen for dinner at half past twelve, he found that Archie had kept a place for him at the long table. ‘This fuckin’ grub’ll kill yer, but it’ll keep yer goin’ till it does.’

A grunt of agreement was safe enough, as he was getting his head down towards the spuds and mincemeat, a delicious smell compared to most of the meals at school. After the pudding and coffee Archie stood up. ‘Let’s go outside a bit, and ’ave a fag.’

‘I forgot mine this morning,’ Bert said.

Men were kicking a tennis ball along the pavement, and they stood to watch. ‘’Ave one o’ these, then. I on’y smoke Players.’

‘Ta.’ Herbert took one and put it between his lips. He would buy a packet and pay Archie back, but meanwhile he had to make sure he didn’t seem a stranger to the habit. Archie held the light, and Herbert puffed without drawing in too much of the smoke. ‘I’m used to Woodbines.’

Archie was looking at one of the office girls walking by. ‘Not bad, eh, is she?’

‘Yeh,’ Bert took another puff of his fag, and managed not to choke.

He cleared swarf from between the machines, or lifted boxes of shellcaps and fuse cases from the gangway to the viewing benches. Archie showed him how to bend from the knees instead of the waist. ‘Ye’re tall and thin, see? and this way you wain’t snap yer backbone. Yer wouldn’t be any good at fuckin’ then, if yer did that, would yer?’

Not that the labour was hard to get used to, Herbert mused, maybe due to the game and cadet scramblings on the obstacle course at school. Everything was so new that whenever he looked at the clock another hour had gone by.

In the evening he sat in his room and popped blisters with a needle heated over a match flame, dousing them in TCP, then picking brass splinters out with tweezers before they could fester. Archie was his mentor, with no asking, sharp eyes for his problems and always volunteering a remedy. ‘If you don’t tek care o’ yer ’ands they’ll get to look like tree stumps, and the women don’t like that. As long as they’re nice and clean they’ll let you get at their knickers.’

He was clocking out when Walter Price, a toolsetter of about forty who had been lame from birth, asked if he played darts. He remembered Isaac’s advice to fall in with everything. ‘Now and then.’

‘It’s like this, yer see, we need a new chap on the team, because that bleddy fool Jack Blundell cum off ’is motorbike and broke ’is arm last week. Can yer cum to the Plough tonight, after yer tea?’

He had scorned the dart board in the games room at school, as something to amuse the tiddlers who were miserable at being away from mummy and daddy. Now he wished he hadn’t, though he recalled some of the jargon. ‘I’m a bit rusty. Down from three-o-one, though, in’t it?’

Walter smiled like a man who only did so to hide his pain. ‘That’s the ticket. We’ll show yer. It’s the enthusiasm of youth we want on the team.’

Herbert’s uncertainty was overcome by assuming that if these men could do it, so could he. At his probationary session, he tried for the bull, and though the first half-dozen went all over the board at least none gouged a hole in the blue plastered wall.

‘Don’t ’urry, lad. Just chuck ’em about a bit to get yer ’and in.’ But after a few more scatterings Walter lost patience. ‘I’ll coach yer. Now, just watch me.’ The disability of having one leg shorter than the other had made Walter a better player than most. ‘I want a treble, don’t I? A seven? Now don’t tek yer eyes off me.’ Lopsided he got one. ‘Now a double six, then a bull — inner and outer. Y’er not lookin’! Look at me!’ He got those as well. ‘Now yo’ ev a go, me owd duck.’

Herbert applied the rules of the firing range, while taking in what he could of Walter’s expertise. Legs apart and firm on the ground, arm straight and fingers holding the dart as if an extension of both, he aligned his eye along the length. Taking time, he let go, and got an outer bull. When the next dart hit a treble Walter set a pint on the table. ‘Sup that. Y’er doin’ well, for a beginner. I on’y ’ope it ain’t starter’s luck.’

He doused his chagrin, but smiled agreement with irony he hoped, at each comment. ‘He’s got a cool ’ead, that’s the main thing,’ Walter said to the others.

Herbert’s long drink of beer put a fur lining in his throat. Use all the time you need, just like they’re doing. Imitate, he told himself. Act. Mimic. Away from work, they knew how to go easy, from long experience. On the next run he tried for a double and a treble, and got them with two darts, though the third was nowhere.

‘It’s a matter o’ patience, from now on,’ Walter said.

‘He’ll do, though,’ came a voice from the back.

Better to try the accent while wiping beer froth from his lips. ‘Mekin’ progress, am I?’ The thud of steel tips into cork was satisfying, but he was happy to let the old hands have a go, since the pint might foil his aim.

People he didn’t know would call in a friendly way as he walked into the canteen: ‘Hey up, Bert!’ His name went up on the notice board and after a few more sessions he was let in on a match, though feared he’d never be as good as most others on the team.

During an hour or so when there was no sweeping, or lifting, or trolleys to push, and it looked like someone had hammered nails against the arrowed hands of the clock face, he had time for thinking, and didn’t much like it. The heavy load in his mind was asking to be sorted out, and that wasn’t what he had taken a job in the factory for. A voice he didn’t trust said the only course was to pack up at his digs and get on the train to another town. Life would be interesting again. The challenge of the unknown would get his blood jumping.

‘Slowin’ down a bit, aren’t you?’ Archie said.

Herbert leaned on his brush handle. ‘I’m bored out o’ my clogs.’

‘You’re gettin’ used to it, that’s why. But don’t let it get yer down, the first three years is the worst. Just ’ave a word with the chargehand and tell ’im yer aren’t mekin’ it pay. Tell ’im yer’ve got to mek it fuckin’ pay, or you’ll gerra job somewhere else. Things might look up, then.’

Herbert thought it best to be inconspicuous. Another place would be just as boring, and there’d be less chance of being recaptured if he stayed where he was.

‘It gets fucking monotonous working on a lathe as well,’ Archie went on, ‘but at least I’m mekin’ munny, so it don’t!’

The best way to diffuse the blues was to flash up the Stalag towers of his school. He swept a coil of swarf from Archie’s lathe, like the discarded tail of a steel piglet. Eileen looked as if trying to weigh him up — what for? — and not for the first time he noted her blush as she turned away. One of the women beside her said: ‘Go on, he wain’t bite yer!’

He might, one day, if he got the chance, and decided to be pleasant in her presence and see where it got him. The dungarees over her bosom in no way hid the shape, and her headscarf only scantily covered glistening auburn hair. Hard to imagine there’d be much chance with such a favourite of the department, though she wasn’t near as stuck up as Dominic’s sister had been.

He marched across to the viewing tables, in response to her shout: ‘Come on, Bert, get these boxes out o’ my sight.’

The first one slotted on to the trolley. ‘Tek yer sweat. You’re workin’ me to death.’

‘We all thought you’d faint when you first come into the factory,’ she said. ‘You looked as if yer’d never done a day’s hard work in your life.’

He leaned close to smell her powder. ‘Yer was wrong. I’ve worked since I was fourteen.’

‘What made yer so strong, then?’

‘Bovril.’ He pushed the trolley away. ‘And Oxo,’ he called over his shoulder.

Arthur Elliot went off sick, so Herbert was set to work on his lathe. ‘We’ll give you a day to get used to it.’ The chargehand thought him a bit daft to be writing the instructions down. ‘After that we’ll set you up on piece work. We’ll find Arthur summat else when ’e comes back.’

‘Now you’ll be able to GRAB!’ Archie bellowed into his ear as he passed on his way to the lavatories. ‘Just like me!’

Herbert practised for an hour, and next morning the chargehand came to see how he was getting on. ‘Have you done this before?’

Herbert flicked the turret ninety degrees, adjusted the sud pipe, and eased in the drill. ‘No, never.’

‘You’re on your own then, from now on. Two bob a hundred. I’ll bring you a time sheet.’

To make it pay in the manner of Archie was not part of his purpose. ‘Grabbing’ wasn’t in him. Still, he thought, if I don’t make a show they’ll smell me out and snub me for being stuck up or incompetent. So, a few days more and it was grab grab grab like the rest of them. Bert nodded a response, too grabbing and making it pay to take a hand off the levers and signal back, which concentration at the job no one understood better than Archie.

The result of putting on an act was that after a while his behaviour became normal, and Herbert had never imagined that life could be so easy and engrossing. For the first week his limbs ached even more by the end of the day, due to hour after hour of daunting repetition, though there was something satisfactory in that as well, proving that grabbing on a lathe was better than sweeping up and humping boxes for a living.

He looked on the machine as his own possession, with its handles and levers, and power supplied by a motor down by his feet. A clumsy touch and your hand got gouged, so he treated it much like the chariot witless Phaeton had tried to control on his feckless jaunt across the skies, pulling and spinning, easing here and there with calculated panache. If a thief came by and began to unbolt it from the base he would fight to the death to stop him.

Conceding his past, at least to himself, he baptized the lathe with a splash of milky suds over the turret, calling it Dominic, after his old chum at school. ‘Hey up, Dommy,’ he said every morning, ‘’ow’s tricks today? Going to be a good lad and earn me a bob or two?’ He could turn off a thousand or more pieces from clocking in to clocking out, which brought in six pounds a week. Stoppages left him with four pounds ten bob, but it was more than enough to live on. With subtle economy he was able to buy a new suit, as well as go out now and again for a pint with Archie.

Eileen was disappointed when he went on the lathe. ‘I can’t shout at yer any more, and I shall miss yer long face.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’

‘Nothing!’ she mimicked. ‘Where did you get that?’ — a warning that he still needed to watch his language.

‘I ’eard it on the wireless, duck. But I miss your nice face, as well. I’ll come and wink at yer now and again.’

‘Won’t yer say summat, as well?’

‘Course I will.’

So that was all right. Machines were being turned off all round, men and women crowding the gangways. Were they downing tools, or was it a ritual they’d been miffy enough not to let him in on? Hard to believe, because Archie, already wearing his jacket, took Herbert’s from the nail and brought it over. ‘Switch off, and put this bit o’ rag on yer back. We’re going out for some swill.’

‘What’s it all about?’

‘War’s over.’

He’d known it couldn’t be far off, but hadn’t assumed they’d pack in work when it was. ‘’Ave the gaffers said owt?’

‘Fuck the gaffers. I expect they’re blindoe already. Anyway, it’s a national ’oliday. Churchill says so.’

The pub crawl took them into every place, a continual push through the crowds in each to get at the bar. In the singing and drinking Herbert lost his cap, but enjoyed himself to an even greater pitch when his mind flashed a picture of the chapel at school, where beyond doubt the poor sods were bellowing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and slavering at the thought of an extra cake with their piss-like char.

Slipping on the cobbles near the Trip to Jerusalem he thumped Archie in the ribs out of happiness at not going down, and got like treatment on the rebound for what deep-buried reason neither could say. An old man with a blind drunk glitter in his eyes and spluttering into his ale at the bar called to his mate above the din: ‘We beat the fuckers. Oh yes, we beat the fuckers. Didn’t we Alf?’

‘Yeh,’ Alf said, ‘but they’ll be at it again in twenty years.’

‘No they won’t,’ the old man said. Bert had never seen a pint go so quick. ‘Not this time they won’t.’

To the tune of ‘Coming Round the Mountain’ (and she’ll be wearing camiknickers when she comes) Bert took a wet-gin kiss from a woman old enough, he thought, to be Mrs Denman’s grandmother. ‘That’s for you, my lovely handsome duck,’ she said.

‘Yer’ve clicked,’ Archie laughed.

‘Course he’s clicked,’ she screamed at them with a laugh, huddling back against her smiling husband.

‘Let’s run, Bert, or she’ll ’ave us both.’

‘She will, an’ all,’ her husband laughed.

In the Royal Children a girl shoved a full pint at Herbert through the fug saying she’d bought it for her bloke but he’d nipped out to heave his guts up, and what a shame it would be to waste it. The cold slurry went down too quickly, and after a further jar in the Rose of England Herbert also ran out to the back yard and threw up as if all the weary years at school were fighting pell-mell to get from his system.

Archie led him the shortest way back to his digs, Bert hardly aware of passing streets. They sang their way up the steps into Mrs Denman’s impeccable parlour, from which place she hurried them into the kitchen. Bert screwed a knuckle into his eyes for clarity. A tall thin man with greying hair was introduced by Mrs Denman as Frank, her Frank, her own especial Frank (she’d had one or two as well), Frank of about forty who, the only one sober because he’d had to stay on at work doing maintenance, suggested Bert be roped to a pit prop, first to stop him falling on his face, and then to shoulder him up to bed.

‘It’s the best place for him,’ Mrs Denman said. ‘Poor lad’s as white as chalk. He ain’t used to it. I wouldn’t trust him to keep even a cup of coffee down in that state, nor yo’, either,’ she said, turning on Archie. ‘So gerrof home and let us look after him.’

Archie laughed — and belched. ‘All right, ma. You don’t need to tell me twice.’

Such speech was perfectly clear to understand, and Herbert didn’t seem one bit drunk, though realized that the slightest wind would blow him down. All he wanted to know was how much sleeping time there was between the coming collapse and getting back to his lathe. The wall clock wouldn’t tell him, one hand moving slowly rightward, while the angle between the two increased until his forehead hit the floor, mocked on his way down by the strident laugh of Bacchus, which seemed to come from himself, though also from those looking on.

‘Ah Beryl,’ and Herbert barely heard Frank’s words, ‘let’s stomp up the wooden hill as well. You can’t blame ’im, though. He won’t have owt else to celebrate like this again in his lifetime. They’ll be no more o’ them concentration camps. Worn’t it terrible?’

‘Them pictures,’ Mrs Denman said.

From his laid-out state in front of the fender Herbert told himself how nice were Mrs Denman’s shapely legs — Beryl, as Frank called her, then felt hands under his armpits and knew he had better co-operate in standing so that they could get him to where he most wanted to be.

Archie, as if undecided about switching on his machine, came over and bellowed: ‘How yer feeling after last night then, Bert?’

Herbert’s head rang like a month of Sunday mornings, his feet felt shoeless and half buried in broken glass, a band of nails gripped around his waist, and his mouth tasted as if he’d swallowed a tramp’s overcoat. ‘Never felt better.’

Archie drew his lips into a smile, and gave him the hundred-year look — as if he had been to the same Understatement College, and considered it a disgrace not to hold himself upright no matter how much booze he had guzzled.

There were moments when Herbert felt that he had always been a workman. Or was he imagining it only in the face of overwhelming reality? It was certainly a soft and easy life compared to his previous existence. A workman lived without heartache as long as his wage packet came comfortably padded on Friday afternoon. Mr Thomas the history teacher used to maunder on about their sufferings, saying how much better it would be if nobody had to slave in ‘dark satanic mills’ and live in dismal slums that threatened to strangle the beauties of England with their brick and mortar tentacles. But Herbert liked the glow of homeliness in the streets, the beer-smelling fagstink of friendly pubs, and the mateyness of the blokes at work. He was captivated by the logic of machinery, of how its many parts worked, fascinated by the certainty of construction and the usefulness of its application. By the end of the working day his dream state was dominated by cog wheels, ratchets and pulleys, which reminded him of his mother talking engine terms with his father when the car used to conk out in India.

His expertise at mechanics was widened when Sarah, a large-bosomed blonde who operated a milling machine, turned pale one morning and, overcome by dizziness, was advised by the toolsetter to go home.

‘Must ’ave bin the flu,’ Herbert said at tea break.

‘I’ll bet it’s her monthlies,’ was Archie’s opinion. ‘Not that it’d put me off. I’d swim through her lovely blood any day.’

Herbert felt disgust at this vivid picture, though was called on to laugh: ‘Ah, I would, as well.’

He was shown how to operate Rachel’s machine, and then told to get on with it. It was necessary to stand back and rehearse the motions, having memorized a cinematic picture of his cursory lesson. The first dozen were slow to make, but throughout the afternoon he built up speed, and turned out so many aluminium elbows in the next few days that when Rachel came back her absence on the production line hadn’t been missed. ‘If you stay here much longer,’ the chargehand said, ‘you’ll be doing my job as well.’

Bert knew when he was being flattered. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be joining up soon.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he laughed, walking away.

Mrs Denman came into his room with a starched and ironed shirt in one hand, and clean underwear in the other. She slotted it neatly into a carrier bag with his folded suit, and stood by the door as if he might forget to take it to the public baths. He was trying to get the grime out of his fingernails. The other lodgers called her ‘Ma’, so why not him? ‘Thanks, Ma.’

She stood by the door. ‘I expect you’ll be going out tonight?’

On Saturday afternoons he went to the baths and hoped he came back looking different. For a few pennies everybody who needed to could get clean. ‘Ye’, I’ve got a date.’

‘I expected as much.’

He didn’t know what she was waiting for. ‘By the lions, at the Council House.’

‘You’re a nice lad, Bert.’

He smiled. Never been called that before. He liked it, from her. ‘Don’t you reckon Archie is, as well?’

She held his hand, but let it go in a moment. ‘He was made brick by brick, though, and you just grew tall on your own.’

She was in a strange mood. ‘Is Frank calling tonight?’

He wondered what he’d said wrong when she answered: ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘I just asked.’

‘We might go to’t Town Arms for an hour or two.’ It was the top of the list for her, as far as pubs went, but he wouldn’t be seen in such a place, so dead that everybody stared at you as you went through the door. In any case, he had to meet Eileen. He sorted his money under her gaze, and when he paid his week’s board she left him to his lack of thought.

If you stayed longer than fifteen minutes the attendant elbowed the door because more people were waiting, but it was enough time to wash, soap, and steam himself, a sybaritic experience after icy showers at school.

He dropped the bag of old working clothes in his room and went down to pork pie and tomato salad tea which Mrs Denman put before him in silence before going to get in the evening’s coal. When she came back he asked: ‘Where’s the rest of them?’

‘Gone for the weekend.’

‘Saves yer some work then, don’t it, Ma?’

‘Well, I like an hour to myself, though the kitchen floor’ll have to be scrubbed. That’s one thing I don’t much like doing.’ She sat opposite with a cup of tea and a cigarette. ‘I told this to Ralph once but he didn’t want to know. You see, I was in an orphanage from the age of eleven, and all I remember was scrubbing floors. They set me to do it with a bucket and brush, and I had these long corridors to keep clean. I was so tired I used to do it in my sleep. I must have scrubbed miles before somebody else was put on to help me. I’ll never forget the smell of that yellow soap. I scrubbed so much my hands would often be raw.’

‘You’ve had a hard life, then,’ Herbert said.

She smiled. ‘You never know, do you? Maybe not as hard as some, all said and done. But I got out of the orphanage at sixteen, and went to work in a factory. Then I got married. I’m not complaining, though. Don’t think that. I’d hate anybody to think I was complaining.’

‘I’ve had a charmed life,’ Herbert said, ‘compared to that.’

‘Well, Bert, all I can say is I hope it stays that way.’

He walked to the middle of town, losing the gloom of Mrs Denman’s reminiscences on the way. At the bar of the Eight Bells, which place was like a scene from the Wild West, he called for a pint. Most were soldiers, and shorter than him, so he had a good view of their clamouring. They had no more fighting to do, in Europe at least, unless later among themselves. After his week’s stint the ale went down with the alacrity of lemonade in earlier days, and he made his way to the back door. Eileen watched him swaggering mac on arm across Slab Square. ‘I’ve bin waiting five minutes. Where’d yer get to?’

‘Sorry, duck, I got stuck in a pub door and couldn’t get out.’

‘You leery bogger. I might ’ave known. Just because you’re on a lathe you think you’re the cock o’ the walk.’ She disliked him being so rough, sensing his different parts, the way he now and again stood at work to drink from his tea mug, or the times he forgot to snap like a dragon at his sandwich. Tonight he was imitating foul Archie Bleasby.

Herbert was amused to note that in the fog of her uncultivated mind she couldn’t sort out what mystified her. He jeered, and gave a gentle push. ‘It’s better than bein’ on viewin’, like yo’.’

Her knuckles stung when she jabbed him back, but he knew better than to show it. ‘I’m not on viewing,’ she snapped. ‘I work on inspection. I use a micrometer to test things. I use a depth gauge.’

He didn’t particularly like himself for talking broad Nottingham, but assumed his freedom depended on it. ‘I can’t ’elp ’ow I was brought up.’

The July day was fresh, but the headscarf made out of a silk map kept her ears warm. ‘I don’t suppose yer can.’ She stood tiptoe for a kiss. Her puckered expectant lips were cool, but he kept his there long enough to warm them up, the first kiss given to a girl, and he thought how he would lie to Archie in not admitting it had taken him so long. Eileen couldn’t understand how somebody like him seemed embarrassed just because people gawped as they walked by. ‘I don’t care who sees us,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s have a drink somewhere.’

Her face was nothing special, that little pointed nose, the waxy skin of her full cheeks, and sharp lips, but there was a brightness in her blue-grey eyes missing from those of other girls in the factory. Even Dominic’s sister Rachel — always a drifting vision — hadn’t such a vivacious shine to her eyes. He gave back Eileen’s affectionate smile, and took her arm like a cavalier, as if she had turned into the most desirable girl ever, which, being the only one, she had. He had to imitate the lout, but even so must show good behaviour, sensing that she would take it as a form of respect and thus become more loving and pliable, though he had to ration his sudden consideration in case she suspected he was who he wasn’t supposed to be. Her sharp tongue with men in the factory was well known, as if she took it for a dead cert that all they wanted as she walked haughtily by with nose cutting the air was to slide a hand up her shapely legs.

In the Peach Tree he fed her shandies while thinking it wise to keep himself on half-pints. She talked so much that all he had to do was listen, went on about what was showing at the forty-odd picturedromes in the city, indicating an encyclopaedic knowledge of what had been on last week, what was on this, and all the coming attractions of the times ahead that she had information about. He knew of her favourite stars, and what details of their lives she had been able to cull from magazines — all of which he would have considered boring had he not thought the information might bolster his authenticity in the world.

Then she laughed at what the women got talking about at the workbench, and at how they all looked after one another, and what a good lot they were, and how she couldn’t stand the women who lived in the same street at home, who were a pack of nosy bone-idle gossipers. He had to look interested, but on the other hand pitied her because she wanted to find herself in a more refined life, and couldn’t because she’d never be anything else but common. Getting a word in edgeways he asked if she had ever read a book, and she said no, but her father who was a collier at Wilford Pit changed a few at the library every week, as if that more than made up for her not caring or being able to. ‘Anyway, he’s older than me,’ she said, knowing his thoughts, ‘so I’ve got lots of time. What about yo’?’

‘Never read one in my life, and don’t suppose I ever shall.’ Watching her animated face made him want to hold her close and kiss her again, the music of her brash accent playing while he did. The only question was when and how. Sense told him to be subtle, to woo her slowly so that she wouldn’t laugh and tell him to get lost. On the other hand maybe she was thinking him backwards at coming forwards, and wouldn’t walk out with him again if he didn’t do something. Archie would already think him slow in that he hadn’t yet ‘gone all the way’. Before the towels went on at ten he brought her a whisky, and she didn’t need daring to get it down. He couldn’t wait for the landlord to bawl out time and flicker the lights on and off to clear the place.

They walked with arms locked down Wheeler Gate, back towards The Meadows. On the canal bridge her peppery breath and the smell of female powder made his penis rise, and he embraced her for a kiss. She took off her headscarf, auburn hair falling over her face. ‘I love you,’ he said, meeting her lips halfway. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, when he put a hand in her blouse to stroke her breasts, and feeling the nipples already responding. ‘I can tell. Let’s go down here.’

Steps led from the orange glow of the road to a tow path, the water dim by a facade of warehouses. He was glad she knew the way and, further from the light, she leaned against the wall. He pressed close, and when his hand was as far up as her suspenders she said: ‘’Ave yer got summat to tek care, duck?’

If she became pregnant and he tried to say it wasn’t his she would scream so loud and long that everybody would not only know but would find out who he was, and he would be sent back in disgrace to school. All the boys would cheer because he’d put a tart in the family way. Or he wouldn’t be sent back to school but would have to marry her, which notion made him screw back a laugh at the scene of his mother and father trying to fathom someone like Eileen.

She thumped his chest. ‘It’s nowt to laugh about.’

‘I didn’t say it was. I can cope, though.’ He had sat on the toilet putting one on for practice, and flushed it away when he couldn’t resist shooting into it.

‘Spread your mac on the path and let’s lay down,’ she urged him.

He felt like Doctor Livingstone going into terra incognita, land unknown in more ways than one, with so much to explore and map. Nervousness was subdued by assuming her to be a friendly native ciceroning him through all the motions, and he was glad she knew the way when she leaned back and drew him into her heavenly softness. He muttered how much he loved her, as if he had indeed been there a few times already but the paradise of this occasion blotted the others out.

‘I ’ad it last night,’ he said to Archie in the canteen, though thinking it ungallant to say he had been with Eileen.

‘Took you long enough. She’s not a bad girl, though, is she? I’ve often fancied her mysenn.’

Herbert spooned into his bread pudding. ‘Who do you mean?’

‘What do you mean who do I mean?’ At least he leaned across so that only Bert could hear. And why not? Courting, they called it. One of the men walking by shouted: ‘You’ll need a lot o’ frenchies wi’ that one, Bert.’

Herbert’s impulse was to grab hold of the foul-mouth fuckpig and push his head into a bucket of cold suds and hold it there till the shit showed through his trousers, as Archie had threatened someone in his hearing, but you were expected to tolerate and even half condone such ribald joshing. If you really felt bad about it you could wait and pay him back at a time and place of your choosing.

Eileen heard it as well, her workbench close enough, though even that didn’t call for a punch-up, because neither was it the custom to be a Sir Galahad, since the girl would scorn the thought that she was unable to stick up for herself. Eileen, thank you very much, could do all that with knobs on, which she went on to prove in no uncertain terms, calling out in a voice plangent enough, in spite of ear-drumming machinery, to reverberate from one end of the shop to the other: ‘You’re jealous, that’s what yo’ are, you sex-starved four-eyed wanking sight for sore eyes.’ Cheers and laughs from the other women at least took the vapid shine from the man’s face. Bert got on with his work, having to force an impassive expression at such blistering language from a girl who on the street would look as if — to use the local term — butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Even on weekday nights they went hand in hand over the Ha’penny Toll Bridge (the best tuppence ever spent) and so many packets of rubbers were called for that there were few hedge bottoms around Clifton and Wilford he and Eileen hadn’t snugged into. She occasionally complained that he was a bit too rough in his speech so he toned it down as much as he dared: ‘What can you expect? I was dragged up in Radford, and you can’t get much rougher than that.’ All the same, he liked it when in her soppier moments she showed a liking for the more genteel life, though finally, like Archie Bleasby, he wondered what was the use of slogging your guts out for days on end at a machine if you had to behave yourself at the weekend. Hadn’t he left all such poxy notions behind at his school?

Five

Space at either end of the long table for his elbows made sure that nobody could come too close. Electricity dried the air, and he felt at ease, readers silent but for the odd cough or foot-scrape. A young girl round-shouldered herself over an open book and he wondered whether putting on his old school voice would help him to get acquainted.

Everybody had a cold, sniffles and hacks around the compass, but compared to the factory it was a civilized atmosphere which he had to sample now and again or go off his head. He wasn’t a Nottingham lad like Archie Bleasby, so could never let on to his mates about sitting in the library. Not that they would have bothered him, or been too surprised perhaps, because most of them read, even if only comics or the Daily Mirror, but he had to keep some part separate from his labouring status, and would have needed a stint in the library even if he had been born in the area. Coming on evenings when he hadn’t enough backbone to go out with Eileen made life among the fog people more tolerable.

Fog people had never known any other area except the one they lived in, and couldn’t see beyond the poor visibility of its enclosure. He remembered the glamour of India, had lived in Sussex and Gloucestershire, and made a perfect escape, like an initiative test, from the prison camp at school where he had learned more in the scholastic line than any of them ever could. The fog around him had been blown away from early days, though it would be dangerous to let the fact go to his head. Even coming out of the library with three books in a carrier bag felt like a betrayal of his own existence.

He didn’t see why he should try to hide his reading from Mrs Denman, however, and sat in her parlour with his face behind a book until bedtime at half past ten. She was old enough to realize that people could have many sides to themselves. ‘It’s good to see you doing summat else, Bert, except boozing with that low life Archie Bleasby, and going out with girls.’

‘It teks my mind off things.’

‘Frank says the same. He likes to get his head stuck in a book, as well.’

Standing in his undershirt before the wardrobe mirror, he stiffened his muscles and felt them rock hard, while Ralph dampened a finger-end and turned the pages of Health and Efficiency, gloating over the full and naked bosoms. ‘I suppose you think you’re Charles Atlas?’

‘They’re more like muscles than them sparrows’ kneecaps yo’ve got above yer elbows.’

Ralph gave what he thought was a superior and enigmatic smile. ‘You didn’t use that sort of language when you first came to live here.’

‘That were ten years ago, surry.’ Talking to Ralph, he could gauge what progress he was making in the factory lingo. ‘Or near enough, any road up.’

‘Only a few months, if I remember.’

Herbert pulled the bedclothes up to his neck. ‘If you keep on reading books like that you’ll wank yourself into a bit o’ dandelion fluff.’ The factory was rich with such phrases, but let poncy Ralph think it one of his. ‘You should get Mary to do it for you. I’ll bet she’d be on’y too willin’.’

‘I don’t think she would at all.’

Herbert’s tone was as gruff as could be managed. ‘Just get ’er in the bushes, and slip it in.’

Ralph winced, and put the magazine under his pillow. ‘Mary’s waiting until we’re married, and I must say I respect her for it.’

‘If yer don’t gerrit in beforehand yer wain’t know whether she’s worth marryin’.’

He pulled the light off, seeming dead set on sleep. ‘It’s easier said than done.’

Bert scoffed. ‘It’s easier done than said, with my lovely bit o’ stuff.’

‘Yes, but Mary and I are in love.’

‘What difference does that mek?’ Herbert sensed that some part of Ralph relished his dirty talk, so paused and put a note of menace into the tone. ‘When are yer goin’ ter bring ’er ’ome to tea?’

‘Never. Not here. We go to the Kardomah, in town.’

‘Oh, do you? Where it’s all posh, eh? Don’t yer want me to meet ’er, then, and tell ’er what a lovely looking girl she is?’

He felt Ralph shudder: ‘There is more select company in the world.’

Herbert felt like punching him, but thought he’d rile him more by staying good humoured. ‘You’re stuck up, that’s your trouble. I’ll bet Mary knows it, as well. That’s why she won’t let you get yer ’and at them little pearly buttons between her legs.’ It was going too far, but at the same time he sounded halfway slighted, so as to make Ralph feel even more superior and wriggle further into the trap.

‘Ma told me you were reading a book the other night. I didn’t believe her, but she convinced me it was true.’

Herbert sounded disgruntled. ‘I ain’t got no secrets. I just like getting lost in a good yarn. At least I don’t read them wanking books,’ though now and again he took one from Ralph’s pillow to study the nudity.

‘You’ve got a filthy mind.’

‘Well, it’s a mind anyway. What do yer do when you’ve finished wi’ ’em?’

‘Every so often Ma comes and takes them away. God knows what she does with them.’

‘Gives ’em to Frank, I expect.’ For the moment Herbert had no more to say, and then they were asleep.

French letters were free gratis and for nothing because Archie’s brother Raymond worked for a dry-cleaning firm, handling officers’ uniforms from army and air force camps, and searching every pocket before throwing tunics and trousers into the bins. ‘He’s got a cardboard box full in his cupboard, and he don’t need ’em like we do.’ Archie lowered his voice in case anyone in the canteen should hear. ‘He hangs around the theatres to get his thrills, or he goes out with sailors. Dad ain’t said a dicky-bird to him, since one of the neighbours blabbed her mouth. I don’t care, though. He lets me tek as many frenchies as I like, and I need ’em to shag my Audrey. Raymond might be a nancy boy, but he’s still my brother, and it’s got nowt to do wi’ me where he shoves his dick.’

‘No, nor anybody else,’ Herbert said, for which understanding remark Archie gave him more french letters than even a priapic rattlesnake could use.

‘The foreman ’anded me five bob last week when I got ’im some. He’s having it off with that Mrs Jennings as works a drill. She’s sitting over there, eating her pudding. But don’t look now, you daft cunt!’

He hadn’t thought to. ‘I’m not stupid.’

‘I know, but ’er ’usband’s sitting next to her.’

‘Thanks for the frenchies, though,’ Herbert said. ‘I’ll buy you a jar o’ Shippoe’s when we go down town.’

‘That’s all right. They’re free for yo’. Just keep banging yer tart, like I do mine.’

Herbert leashed his smile into a straight face, the only way to be sure of not offending anybody. ‘How old was yer when yer first ’ad it?’ he asked at the door.

‘Well, I musta bin fourteen.’ Archie gave a marauder’s grin, and pulled up his collar against the rain. ‘I fucked this girl in Colwick Woods. We got down in the bushes. Lovely bit o’ stuff. What about yo’?’

‘About the same age, I reckon, only it was on the canal bank, up Wollaton. But it was more like she had me, because she was sixteen.’

On Saturday morning Herbert looked out of the parlour window and noted the fine spun hair and neat white shorts of Ralph’s girl Mary leaning her bike against the wall before coming up the stairs to knock. They were going on a fortnight’s tour of the Lake District, and Herbert envied her evident affection for milksop Ralph who ran to the door and went back down the steps with her so that she wouldn’t have to come in and meet Bert the lout. He watched them walk their bikes along the street towards the station, and holding each other’s hands took so much space that a milk float almost brushed into them.

Mrs Denman let the empty bed while Ralph was away to a Royal Marine on leave, who told everybody to call him Jacko. The first thing that came out of his kitbag was an unbroached bottle of South African sherry, which Jacko placed so conspicuously on the mantelshelf that it might as well have had a big label stuck on it saying DRINK ME.

‘Want a swig, matey?’

Herbert was lying on his bed for a quick read before tea. ‘Ar, wouldn’t mind.’

Jacko used both hands to pass the bottle, as if it was a head he’d decapitated in the scramble of battle, and Herbert, after a fair glug, returned it likewise to the proprietor, who had two bigger swallows without bothering to wipe the spout — which was noted as friendly — before putting it back on its altar.

Herbert walked the street while it was still daylight and went into a pub for a drink. His working jacket had come from a pawnshop, and he wondered who had owned it before, whether it had been sold out of destitution, or by a man who had taken a sudden step up in life. Maybe he’d even kicked the bucket. He thought a good story could be written called ‘The Adventures of a Jacket’, but spat the thought out as he pushed tall and upright to the bar and called for a pint to chase down Jacko’s oversweet sherry.

Individual voices were crushed under the singing, and such din, mostly from women and soldiers, cheered him after being at tea with lugubrious low-browed Jacko, who tackled Mrs Denman’s food as if she was trying to poison him. Though he normally enjoyed staying in a crowded pub, where no one could possibly care who he was, he suddenly sensed danger among such numbers, as if a banshee message was trying to tell him something. His pint only half gone, he turned and saw Dennis, one of Mrs Denman’s other lodgers, a tall and thin man with a Ronald Colman moustache.

‘Thought it was you,’ Dennis said. ‘Have one on me.’

‘Ain’t finished my own yet.’ He held it high. ‘Then I’ve got to go. I’ve a nobble on.’

Dennis called for a whisky. ‘I’ve just put my woman on a 39 bus. She lives in Radford, and she’s got to get home before her husband comes in from his shift at the Raleigh. Sure you won’t have one?’

‘Thanks. Another time.’ A clatter of chairs sounded, and then a scream as the door all but burst its hinges. ‘Eh, fuckin’ ’ell,’ came a shout. ‘What’s all this, then?’

Two six-foot policemen pushed with no messing through the crowd. Dennis turned away. ‘Watch yourself. It’s Popkess’s lads, come to pick somebody up.’

They could be checking Identity Cards, and Herbert wasn’t yet eighteen. He’d be yanked off for being under age, and charged with having a forged one. Then he’d be sent to Borstal, though maybe he wasn’t as frightened as he should have been because one of the lads at work had been in Borstal and according to his account, the regime sounded more easy-going than the one at Herbert’s school.

Speech and laughter corroded away, and the coppers got hold of a man a few paces along the bar, fixed him in a half-nelson when he tried to dispute what was said of him, and walked him out with his feet hardly touching the floorboards.

The pub was soon back to singing and talking, but more relaxed than before, as if those unmolested by the police were glad they’d been spared — this time. ‘It was Alf Morley.’ Dennis knocked back another whisky. ‘Still, it could have been anybody. As they say in this town: every copper’s got your number on the underside of his left boot. Old Alf will be back in six months, though, mark my words. It’s just that he gets a bit light-fingered now and again. Careless, if you like.’

Herbert now thought there was something to celebrate. ‘I’ll have that drink you mentioned, after all.’

When he went to change out of his overalls Jacko pointed sternly at the bottle, indicating its contents down to the halfway mark. His eyes seemed closer in, and the trenchlines across his forehead made him look uglier, if that was possible. ‘Have you been helping yourself to my sherry?’

Bert fastened his waistcoat buttons. ‘I don’t do things like that, shag.’

Jacko was convinced by his hard look. ‘Well, somebody has, and no mistake.’

Only one person could have taken a secret drink, unless Jacko, who maybe was still shell-shocked, had sleepwalked it down his gorge. ‘Too much like piss for me,’ Bert said.

‘Piss, you say?’ Jacko poured halfway up his Navy-issue mug. ‘Let’s drink most of it between us before any more goes.’ He held it out. ‘I’m sorry I asked if it was you, shipmate, but I had to make sure.’

Unsociable to refuse, it went down like a rat on roller skates. Jacko drank enough to leave a quarter in the bottle. ‘It’ll help us to enjoy that stuff she puts on the table. What’s it called?’

‘Shepherd’s pie.’

‘Yes, I wouldn’t like to know what part of the poor fucking shepherd it was ripped out of. She must be Sweeney Todd’s widow.’ He had the saddest face Herbert had seen, and he had passed a few on the street these last few months. In Jacko’s case such an expression could turn mean rather than easy-going, as was proved when he put the catch on the door and with his back to it slowly undid his trouser buttons, keeping the bottle in his other hand. A glaze came over his eyes at such a malicious notion of justice. ‘There’s only one way to deal with this situation.’

Herbert assumed that was how rum-poachers were dealt with in the marines, which made him glad he intended going in the army, as he watched Jacko piss the level of the bottle back to halfway before setting it again, none the worse for colour, in its place.

Yet Herbert, being the age he was, had never seen anything so funny. He opened the window and let out such a bellow of laughter over the backyards that a turbaned woman pushing a kid in its cot stared as if he had gone clean off his rocker. The kid began yelling, and she hurried along in case the madman at the window decided to jump overboard and splash her flipflops with his life’s blood.

He drew his head in and thought maybe it wasn’t funny at all, as Jacko the Beast calmly laid all items of his kit out on the bed as if the CO would pat him on the back when he came marching through.

To warn Mrs Denman of her peril could be to accuse her prematurely, because it may not have been her at all, though if not, who else? He wanted to describe the intriguing problem in a letter, but didn’t know who would be interested. His father, certainly not, nor his mother. They’d be disgusted, and who wouldn’t? Yet Barney the English master used to say that a sense of humour was the first sign of intelligence, and he should know, because nobody had ever seen him laugh.

Herbert couldn’t pen the Sherry Saga to Dominic Jones either, without blowing the gaff on his town of refuge. If he’d still been at school he could have concocted a moral issue out of the case, though Barney might not have liked such an essay, saying he had made the yarn up, and that if he hadn’t it was not a fit topic for a composition, though the boys would have laughed over it for a few days.

Feeling it a shame to waste such material he sat in Mrs Denman’s parlour on Sunday afternoon while she was in bed with Frank, and wrote a letter to himself, no less a story than when the head and tail had suffered the fate of Procrustes’ bed. He called Mrs Denman Mrs Penman, and related how he had seen Jacko, now Mungo, go through his motions with the bottle, as if to make the alcoholic whizzbang stronger, or maybe even to take care of some ailment he’d got. All he had to do now was put the story aside and wait for the real-life ending.

Another way of keeping contact with the hidden part of himself was to call on Isaac, shed some of the person he had become in the factory with each step up the wooden staircase.

He carried a loaf and two pounds of potatoes, a tin of condensed milk and a few apples from a corner shop, as well as a twenty-packet of Senior Service which Isaac liked. A bag of sugar for five bob came from one of the viewers whose father worked at the refining factory near Colwick.

‘Your accent’s changed,’ Isaac said, though not disapprovingly.

Herbert found it comforting to use rough speech, while knowing he could go from the hot tap of the local argot to the cold faucet of his school any day of the week. ‘It ’ad to, in the factory.’

‘As long as you don’t. At least not radically.’

He forked up his chips, knife held too close to the blade. ‘I can’t do that.’

Isaac put on an ironic smile. ‘Your table manners have altered, as well.’

‘You do as others do.’

‘I know all about that. But keep yourself intact, all the same. Your own soul, I’m talking about.’

‘I can’t do owt else, can I?’

Isaac put tea on the table, and they lit cigarettes. ‘You’ve taken to that factory like a duck to water, Herbert Thurgarton-Strang. Or should I say Bert Gedling to a quart of Shipstone’s ale? It shows you’ve got character. I expect your parents have, too.’

‘Don’t mention them.’

‘Still like that, is it?’

He felt no need to be on his guard with Isaac. ‘Nar. I want the credit for myself.’

‘Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but you’ve got to think of people’s feelings, and write them a letter now and again.’

He’d sent one since arriving in Nottingham, telling them he was working in Stoke on Trent. Archie had dropped it in a box when he’d gone there to see a girl. ‘Anyway,’ Isaac said, ‘thanks for the sugar. Mine went days ago, with my sweet tooth.’

Herbert, drained for words due to the intensity of his life, or that’s how he put it to himself, sometimes liked sitting in idleness and silence, and though he did not much care who he really was — whether Bert or Herbert — it brought a sense of peace that was vitally needed if he was to carry on any life at all.

Isaac took down one of his strangely scripted volumes and read with head going faintly back and forth as if wanting to sing the rhythms, while Herbert in his chair faded around the edges of sleep, visions fastening on to him brought about by Isaac’s mutterings. Maybe Isaac was saying a form of prayer, not the sort they were drummed into mouthing at school, but one which put him into a trance, and brought dreams for Herbert of being back in India and walking behind an elephant, huge plates of grey excrement flopping from between its rear legs, his mother and father laughing from their chairs on the veranda of the bungalow. Where did that come from? The same place as the meteorite nightmare above the jagged skyline of mountains, split in half by a scimitar of lightning. Back at school he was running along a lane in vest and shorts, coming into the gate after a cross-country run. The runner, who was somebody he didn’t know, turned out to be an old man, drooling and dying as he fell into the bracken. You needed a dirk to pin such fuzzy pictures down, because when he tried to re-run them on waking they slipped away like mercury.

‘You’re looking a bit serious for a chap of seventeen.’ Isaac broke into his exhaustion. ‘Let me send you back to your digs with a drop of whisky. I’ve got a secret bottle, for times like this.’ He took wet glasses from the sink. ‘I think you must have had a hard week.’

‘I suppose they all are in the factory. But I’m used to it by now.’ Nothing easier. An hour or two could go by at his machine and he marvelled that work got done with no variation in the measurements. Had it been sleep? Cleft in two, part of him dreamed, part of him worked. He lived as different a life in those lost periods as he had just now in Isaac’s room, and would never know what was pumped into him because it was impossible to understand. Not that he cared to, for you didn’t poke your nose where it had no use being, and where nothing of interest could be explained even if you took the trouble to wonder.

Isaac held up his glass. ‘L’chaim!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Long life, to you. It’s Hebrew.’

The promise of longevity seemed superfluous to someone who assumed he was going to live forever, or as close as dammit. Nevertheless, Herbert said ‘L’chaim, then,’ and took a fiery swig.

He thought the sherry in the bottle had gone down by half an inch, but couldn’t be sure, despite the glitter of certainty in Jacko’s eyes as he packed his kit for departure. ‘I wouldn’t say she liked it, but I wish I could have seen her face. Made her look prettier, maybe.’

‘She’s a good sort.’ Herbert defended her. ‘And I’ll bet she used to be very good-looking. I like Ma.’

Jacko stared at him, unbelieving. Such an uncertain end to the Sherry Saga was hardly worth either story or letter, but Herbert noted Mrs Denman’s glare from the window as Jacko, who left the bottle behind, marched smartly away with his bag and case to the station.

Having much on her mind Mrs Denman hurried to scour the room before Ralph got back, and maybe to work off her indignation at such a vile trick, though perhaps after a sip she assumed the doctored sherry had gone sour of its own chemical will, thinking no evil of Jacko at all. Herbert saw the emptied bottle in the dustbin and, however it was, tore his tale into shreds for fear Mrs Denman would read the papers with disgust on finding them under a shirt in his room.

Ralph pushed his bike up the steps, through the house and into the shed, limping as if he had worn his arse out on the saddle. He’d probably stood up in the train all the way from Ambleside. Herbert watched him fix the padlocks on his bike with a grin he hadn’t seen before. He couldn’t make it out, but thought he’d know before long. At the welcome home tea they were shown Ralph’s map and the routes he had pedalled with Mary, a maze of pencillings and arrows and circles. Mrs Denman fussed about what a long way it was, and I’ll bet you was tired, and it’s a wonder you didn’t get lost, and I’m sure you both slept like logs at night.

Herbert’s suspicion that Ralph was keeping something back was confirmed when they were in their beds and before the light was put out. ‘She let me have it.’

‘What, yo’? I don’t believe yer.’

‘Oh yes, she did. Coming down from Helvellyn. And again near Keswick. And then near Ambleside, and then in the bushes near Langdale youth hostel — after supper.’

Herbert imagined penpusher Ralph putting a map on the wall and sticking pins in every place he’d had his oats, till it looked like the Lake District was doing to close down with a smallpox epidemic. ‘And you’re still going to marry ’er?’

‘More than ever. I told you, we’re in love.’

She’s probably in the club by now. ‘I’m dead jealous.’

He pulled off the light. ‘Knew you would be. Good night.’

There were times when Herbert thought he had landed in as compact a prison as the one at school. He was lucky, but discontented, knowing that his present state would have been less of a prison if he’d been able to write to someone and tell them about it.

The walls were made of everything well worth describing, which heightened his perceptions and rattled his nerves. He wanted to write something about it, anything. Curiosity was spoon-fed without asking, during every hour but those passed in the dead land of sleep, where too much was minced into his dreams to sort out.

He also knew that his aching to write to someone was an impulse to betray himself and make a glorious failure out of his enterprise. The scale of the fall was tempting, but a sense of self-preservation veered him from the course of Lucifer hurtling through space, or Phaeton glorying in a smash up of universal proportions.

The police raid on the pub worried him more than it had at the time. A partial blackout had been useful on getting to Nottingham, but the war was now over and the streets lit — though not as bright as pre-war, Mrs Denman said, what with rationing and call-up still going on.

The end of the war against Japan in August made him feel still more visible. He couldn’t otherwise explain his anxiety, as if a curtain was slowly lifting between him and the world he had abandoned. To be clawed back into the life of school was such a prospect that he would sooner sling himself into a vat of acid. Here was where he belonged, because he had made the place his own and was familiar with everyone. There were times when he couldn’t understand how it had been so easy. Maybe he had been to a good school after all, because what other could have trained him to fit in so well? If they caught him he would break out again, just like the chaps in Caged Birds, who had escaped time after time, and hide himself even more where they would never think to look.

All the same, in spite of his fears, he would not walk the street except openly and with the expected workman swagger. He would go into a pub if he felt like it and have it with Eileen whenever they went out together. To lessen the chances of being found and forced back to school he decided to volunteer for the army a month or two before he was eighteen so that there’d be less questions asked than enrolling under conscription. After all, he told himself with a pride not altogether trusted, he was Thurgarton-Strang, and the longer he was free the less likely was anybody to find him.

Six

From the heights above the forest a dusty mist lay like a pancake over a thousand lights trying to pierce but merely glowing through. He walked down the slope from the bus stop with Eileen, and Sheila her workmate, into the sodium atmosphere of frying and candy floss. If there was a place where nobody would be able to pick him out it was among the jam-packed crowds of the Goose Fair, yet in such pushing phalanxes he felt perilously unsafe, couldn’t explain why every glazed look seemed like a threat to his wellbeing. It was illogical, ludicrous even, and he forced a smile of protective inanity back on to his face.

Eileen on one arm, and Sheila taking the other, he guided them among the roundabouts — wondering what his school chums would say if they saw him now — and pulled them up the steps on to the slowing caterpillar. When the hood went down he’d be able to kiss them both, but would Eileen allow it? Well, she didn’t stab at his bollocks with her elbow, though maybe she was too dim to cotton on to where his hands were straying, and she laughed with the rest of them as long as he let his fingers creep in her direction now and again.

He threw a penny to a couple of kids who were begging, and bought sailor hats to amuse the girls before pulling them in for a circuit on the ghost train. On coming out, it was as if an invisible cloud of depressing gas flowed between the Saturnalian wailings of delight, and the rhythmical thump of traction engines. He had caught a fit of anxiety full blast, stood as if pinioned by the different coloured lights maggoting at his eyes, and by the people pushing around him, some malign force dividing him more than at any time since running away from school, as if a patient and eagle-eyed Inspector Javert in the crowd had been set on to get him.

Such paralysis couldn’t be explained, and fear even less. ‘Come on, come on,’ Eileen said, ‘get a move on, slow coach. What are you standing there for as if you’ve lost your way? We want to go on summat else, don’t we, Sheila?’

One moment lost beyond any hope of getting his senses back into the atmosphere of the fair, the next he felt the usual grin forcing its way on to his face, as if someone pulling strings had him under control. He lifted a wrist to sniff at flesh, as if the swarf smell of the factory might still be there, which it was, in spite of the thorough White Windsor swill he had given himself at the sink. The thrill of being at bay buoyed him all his waking hours. Even when unaware it fuelled his senses and fed his alertness.

They got into a swingboat and, pinned a moment at the top, Herbert saw the whole area of smoke and lights, the tents for a king and his army celebrating a victory over some nation only a little less barbaric than themselves. Then down went the swingboat, and up again into a whole sky of shrieks which made the scene more eerie. Back on the ground, Sheila jerked forward and was sick. Disgusted, he stepped away rather than ask if she was all right and mop her chalky brow, though not before a splash of vomit spewed over his shoes. To prove she was again ready for anything she led them on a climb up the helter-skelter, and they followed on the sedate corkscrew down. Herbert began to hate such spinning and jolting, but when they’d handed their mats back forced himself to say: ‘Now let’s go on summat else. I can’t have enough fun like this.’

‘You’re spending too much munny on us, duck,’ Eileen said.

‘That’s all right.’ Thank God it was only once a year. Anyway it was his money to do what he liked with. Did she think he was going to save it up so that they could one day get married? Not with anyone, and certainly not with trash like her — which sentiment shamed him, and he immediately sent it back to where it came from, though she had mentioned too often lately that another of her friends at work had got engaged.

He occasionally had a horror of sinking among them forever, as if he had lived years in the last three months, school so far away it might never have existed. And suddenly, as they stood at a stall eating brandy snap, he felt he had come out only for a night and would be going back next morning. Such vacillations of mood were alarming, more dangerous than he liked. The screech and rattle of the fair seemed a threat from which he must escape, just as he had from school. He was a caged bird wherever he was.

Eileen tugged his arm. ‘We ain’t bin on the cakewalk yet.’

He wanted to say fuck the cakewalk. ‘Let’s go to the pub, and I’ll buy you some drinks.’ Standing erect, the most confident smile irradiated, he put thumbs firmly in the pockets of his waistcoat. ‘I’m parched. I want some ale.’ To be skint for the rest of the week was a small price to pay, and the girls must have read his thoughts, they were good at that, on their own level anyway.

‘Only a few more rides,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ll fork out for ’em, won’t we, Sheila?’

Sheila nodded, but after another go she was sick again, a signal that they’d had enough of roundabouts, so went up Radford Road to the Langham, where the first pint of the evening took Herbert out of his puzzling insecurity and into a roistering Bert whose thoughts were his and nobody else’s.

‘I don’t know who this bloke was,’ Archie said as they walked into the canteen, ‘but yesterday he asked about you. He wanted to know how long you’d worked here.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘How would I know? Just a bloke.’

He kept down the fear that went through him, half forgotten since the Goose Fair, just as lively, however, on coming back at Archie’s revelation. ‘I mean, did he look like Charles Laughton? Was he a beanpole with a mardy face or just stubby and miserable?’

Archie picked up a dinner from the counter, and laughed. ‘Bit o’ both, I suppose.’

‘And what did you tell ’im?’

‘I towd ’im the truth.’

Herbert sorted through the gravy to get at his pasty. ‘That’s all right, then, but what was that?’

‘That yer’d started ’ere the same time as me, when we was fourteen.’

‘Did ’e say owt?’

‘’E just pissed off. He sounded like a copper’s nark. If ’e’d asked owt else I’d a cracked ’is shins wi’ me boots. On the other hand he could have been a chap from the offices wanting to mek sure yer insurance cards was up to press.’

Herbert pushed the rest of his food away. ‘It tastes like shit.’

‘It allus does,’ Archie said, ‘but I enjoy it because I’m hungry. As long as you shake lots o’ pepper on it. Do you know, Bert, the first thing I noticed when I came in this canteen at fourteen was that they had pots o’ pepper on the tables. We’d never ’ad pepper at home. We still don’t. I didn’t know what it tasted like, but I love it now.’ He leaned across the table, voice turned lower. ‘What was ’e after? Did yer do a job? Are you on the run?’

Herbert smiled. ‘Ar, course I am, from a wicked uncle.’

‘Yer can tell me. I shan’t nark, not me. I ’ate coppers.’

‘I know yer do. Same ’ere.’ Herbert considered packing up, going to the station and getting on the next train to anywhere — but decided it was safer and more comfortable staying where he was. It wasn’t done to panic, or change plans till you had to. ‘I absconded from school. It was more like a borstal, though.’

‘I thought it was summat like that.’ Archie winked. ‘You’ll be all right with us, Bert. Tek a tip from me. If anybody asks yer owt, just tell lies. That’s number one. Lie till ye’re blue in the face, and they’ll end up believin’ yer. I’ll back yer up if yer need me to, though I don’t expect yer will. People allus want to believe yer, even when they know you’re tellin’ lies, as long as yer go on long enough wi’ a straight face.’

Herbert pulled the plate towards him, finished every stain and crumb. Work called for all the food he could get. Telling lies was wrong, even cowardly, done only by inferior people who were afraid. So he had been drilled into thinking. He felt uneasy at his ready agreement with Archie, who wasn’t cowardly or inferior at all: Herbert’s life at the moment could be considered one big lie, but it was no more than an actor’s performance on stage who for two hours was entirely in the skin of someone else. And if you do it for two hours, or even for a year, what’s the difference?

‘Another thing,’ Archie came back with pudding for them both, ‘why don’t you introduce me to Sheila? The four of us could go out for a drink.’

Herbert pushed a hand forward for his spoon. ‘Yeh, that’s a good idea. I’ll talk to Eileen, and see what she says.’

‘We can go to the White Horse on Saturday night. They’ve got good ale there, and you can sing if you like.’

People coughed their way to work through the first frosts of October, an enclosing visibility giving Herbert more confidence in his role as a man on the run, except that he would rather die than run. He walked quickly, however, all-round glances keeping watch at every angle, obtuse or acute, thinking that if anyone followed they’d need to be fit to maintain his rapid pace, and that if anybody tried to get him on the street he would kill them as they deserved, using the strength put into his arms by lifting and carrying in the factory, and the survivor’s force grown in him since birth.

Such reflections, he felt, were risible, knowing that he was often split between desperate speculations and a delightful sense of having no cares in the world, and that at Mrs Denman’s he was one of the family. He was safe, and looked after in a way beyond his experience. How she made any profit on his few pounds bed and board he couldn’t fathom, but Archie said that was her worry, and he should bless his luck at having fallen into such a cushy billet.

Her friend Frank was more often at the house now that the war was over. He worked at the tobacco factory as a machine supervisor, and Mrs Denman told Herbert he had ‘lost’ his wife from cancer ten years ago. She met him in a pub when he was trying to swamp his bereavement in too much poisonous booze, and when he took a fancy to her she got him to put a stop to it.

Herbert wondered whether Frank was to be trusted, but knew he was because he didn’t ask personal questions. His talk had a serious side in that he could go on about books by H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, to name a few. He was also a firm Labour Party man. ‘I know everybody’s having a hard time these days, though nobody’s as badly off as before the war. It’s going to be a long struggle but I know we’ll win through with Labour, don’t you worry. We’ll end up living in a country with more equality in it than there’s ever been. It’s marvellous to think we’ll both be able to see it, Bert.’

Herbert agreed, and felt privileged to hear such views, though wasn’t sure about equality ever being possible, or even whether he wanted it, knowing he had always felt himself different from everybody around him, to which Frank said with a laugh that he hadn’t lived long enough yet to know that, basically, everybody was more or less the same in that they all had a right to happiness and a roof over their heads, something Herbert had no option but to agree with.

As well as politicians Frank showed an intelligent interest in the war, maybe due to his having missed active service by being in a reserved occupation. This was more to Herbert’s taste, who could enthuse about the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, D-Day, and the Battle of the Bulge. Mrs Denman was happy to see them huddled by the fire — ‘talking the hind leg off a donkey,’ she said, setting down cups of tea.

They were still talking when Ralph came in, fagged out and shifty-eyed from seeing Mary. ‘Still getting yer oats?’ Bert said, when they were in their room.

‘It seems to upset you.’

‘Well. I always reckon it’s too good for some people.’

There was a catch in Ralph’s voice. ‘I’m not getting anything, as a matter of fact. I can’t think why, all I know is she doesn’t let me do it in Nottingham. She says it’s too common to do it here, that it isn’t right.’

Herbert knew that his laugh would be loud enough to wake Mrs Denman, or even the dead, so Bert had to manage with a snort. ‘You mean to say you’ve got to go all the way to the Lake District for a bang?’

‘Maybe. Seems so. But it’s more romantic up there. Well, that’s her daft idea, anyway.’

‘Your lady-love don’t seem very accommodating. What do you think it’s going to be like when you’re spliced? She’ll twist you round her little finger.’

Ralph’s laugh was sinister. ‘No, she won’t. I’ll have her when I want her. I’ll get my own back. I’ll make her sit up. But in the meantime, I love her, and I don’t know what to do.’

‘Well, I can’t tell yer.’ Bert got his head down for sleep, after murmuring that if he was in that situation he would read the Riot Act, and no mistake.

After a darts match one evening Archie supposed, when they got to their pints, that the factory would be needing less hands now that the war was over and done with. Young ‘uns like them wouldn’t find much work when they and everybody else came out of the army. ‘It’ll be like before the war, if we aren’t careful, back to the dole, no matter what government we’ve got in.’

Herbert passed his cigarettes across. ‘Nah, we’ll be working flat out for years on reconstruction.’ Every time he called at the library he read The Times and the Daily Telegraph, a habit not lost from his interest when they were laid out in the reading room at school. ‘The Labour Government’ll keep everybody at work, don’t you worry. They’re pledged to it.’

Grumbling went on all the time, and though Herbert listened, and sometimes took part because much of it was humorous, he couldn’t basically see what anyone had to belly-ache about, unless they did so because otherwise they would be silent, and that such talk was a device for helping them to breathe. It was one grouse after another, about work, rationing, the weather, the government, the gaffers at the factory, but the patina of liberty made everything palatable to Herbert.

Work took the strain of what he saw as his previously unreal existence: the rations were enough, and the weather — foul though it mostly seemed to be — enclosed him with friendliness and protection. He was clad in an old army topcoat dyed navy blue to keep himself warm, and out of his earnings bought a utility-style suit for second best. He had a roof over his head, as well as a girlfriend who let him have it whenever there was an opportunity. What more could he want?

Mrs Denman even turned her back when he led Eileen up to his room on Sunday afternoon, a safe enough time because Ralph made sure of being at Mary’s house while her parents were out visiting family. Herbert pictured him on bended knees in the parlour pleading with her to let him get it in while he — Bert — was having no trouble banging away, and telling Eileen not to cry out so loud every time she came.

All in all his existence was as great an advance on former times as could be imagined. At the factory he was liked because he mucked in with everybody else, and grafted willingly at his machine. The chargehand would be sorry to lose him when he got called up, and said they’d be sure to keep a job for him when he came home again.

Nobody expected to go on living in the same way forever, and that was a fact, and Bert knew his present status couldn’t last because neither had the first easy part of Herbert’s life in India. Soon after the New Year he took the morning off, put on his suit, and got on the bus for the recruiting centre, to breathe the full extent of his chest, piss cleanly into a jar, cough successfully, and see his foot shoot into the horizontal when tapped with a rubber hammer. ‘You’re Al,’ the MO said, so he signed on for the duration of the present emergency as an infantryman, and after a few more questions was told to go back to work and wait for his papers.

‘What did you do a daft thing like that for?’ Archie wanted to know. They stood, before switching on for the afternoon stint. ‘The army’s worse than Borstal. I’ll only go at the last minute. It’s fucking useless. In fact, they’ll have to drag me in.’

Herbert had expected biting anger, and got it. ‘I want to join up of my own free will.’

‘Free will? What’s that? The only free will I know about is to fuck off somewhere where they can’t find me, and not go. War’s over, in’t it? Blokes like us don’t have any free will, anyway. We get fucked from pillar to post and the only thing we should do is punch ’em in their four-eyed phizogs when we get the chance. Smash their bleedin’ teggies in.’

Herbert smiled. ‘Yeh, you’re right.’ His only exercise of free will had brought him here. Now he was on the threshold of another go, and wasn’t sure where it would land him. Archie said the war was over, and so it was, but the war would never be over, because wars never were. Conflict was a factor of human nature, so there’d always be a call for soldiers. Even if wars were finished on land and sea you had your own personal war battling on in yourself, which inner contest he felt had been wearing him away since birth. ‘The sooner I go in the army the sooner I get out,’ was his poor excuse. ‘Anyway, what’s a few months more or less?’

Archie had to think about such a serious matter, though his mood was relaxed. ‘Look at it this way, Bert. Say it’s three months. Well, three months is ninety days’ boozin’, scoffin’ and fuckin’ time, in’t it? And grabbin’ at your machine as well — and doing what you like after clocking out at night. It’s a lot better than being a bag o’ shit in the army and getting barked at all day.’

People complained eternally because they didn’t have the mental flexibility to see into the future. Such an ostrich-like attitude, Herbert thought, must have come from being at home all their lives. On the other hand, maybe Archie’s views were the only ones worth believing in. His basic sense was undeniable. Herbert, being two people, doubted everything at times, though he still wasn’t so fixed into the present that he could settle his mind about it. ‘You can do those things anywhere.’

‘Yer think so?’ Archie shook his head. ‘Yer know, Bert, sometimes I can’t mek yo’ out. You must have been brought up different to me.’

‘Maybe I was, but not all that much.’ Herbert looked at the big white face of the clock, the same dictator in everybody’s life, and pressed the button to start his machine. ‘There are times, though, when I can’t mek myself out, I’ll tell you that.’

‘Well, that ’appens to all of us,’ Archie laughed.

Seven

In weapons training at White Down Camp Herbert had the Bren gun stripped and together again quicker than anybody else. It would have been too boring not to.

‘Have you done this before?’

There was a lot Herbert didn’t know, but this he did, and he was surprised at how much of the old cadet knowledge came back. ‘No, Sergeant.’

The bullshit was no bother, either, not difficult to be smart beyond the demands of reason. Part of himself that relished freedom slipped awhile into abeyance. The men belly-ached in the first week or two but Herbert supposed it was because they had never slept from home. Having nothing to envy them for, he could only feel contempt, and keep as much as possible to himself.

Nor was the usual larking around any bother to stay clear of. Smart bastards just one notch down from sadistic made apple-pie beds, tied bootlaces together, soaped a patch of billet floor so as to watch others go arse over tit as they came in from tea, nicked kit one day and put it back in place the next — or didn’t.

Barraclough from Merseyside was a past master, and Herbert wondered where he had picked up the facility. Maybe it came to him instinctively, as with someone born evil, until he heard him let on in a boastful voice that his brother was a regular and had put him wise to what went on in recruit training — or perhaps what ought to.

All in all, Herbert thought it just like early days at school but, seeing Barraclough about to half-inch his toothbrush, spun him around and pulled him close, to face the sort of black look Archie would have put on, but which came readily enough. ‘That’s mine, snot chops,’ Bert said.

‘Can’t you take a joke, then?’

All the venom in Herbert’s expression was brought out for use — and with interest — after the merciless torments rained on him at the age of seven. ‘When I want to, shag, I’ll let you know.’

Ashley Pemberton, a fearful and diffident youth, came from somewhere in Hampshire, and should never have found himself among such a rough lot. In spite of his grammar school background he hadn’t been considered as officer material, and Herbert could see he wasn’t fit to be a private soldier either. Probably his parents were glad to get rid of him, hoping the army would settle his ever-shifting expression and turn out a new man for them. He was knowledgeable and somewhere intelligent, but slow because he had to question the reason for everything. Herbert halfway pitied him, while smiling at his predicament.

Ashley was tormented more than anyone else because, unable to see the reason for it, he was helpless against bullying. Tall, though thin, he could have been a match for anyone, but didn’t have the spirit to resist or fight back. In the army it was the survival of the fittest, Herbert saw, sink or swim, no fucking nonsense, as he watched the lads punching Ashley against the billet wall because the imperfect layout of his kit for inspection had got them all a bollocking from the sergeant-major.

A belly blow sent him across the bed, and Barraclough jumped on him. ‘Let’s have his bags off, and blanco his knackers.’

A timid uncomprehending scream came from Ashley as the operation began. ‘Leave the poor bugger alone,’ Fraser called from up the billet, but went on reading his comic.

‘Let’s have the blanco, somebody,’ Barraclough shouted out of the scrum. Herbert paused in polishing his boots, to pick up the tin of Cherry Blossom from his locker and make a way slowly through the onlookers. They parted willingly enough, thinking he only wanted to see the fun, or do the plastering himself.

Using the whole force of his arm he pulled Barraclough upright in one swing. ‘You can’t do a thing like that.’

‘What?’ Barraclough saw the opened tin of black polish and laughed. ‘You mean you want to do it with that? I didn’t think of polish. That’ll make him look a right arse-hole.’

‘No, I’m asking you to stop all this.’

‘Oh, are you?’

‘He’s a soldier. You can’t do it to him.’

‘Can’t we? Well, you just fuck off, and mind your own business.’ He turned to the others, and made to get on with it. ‘We’ll do what we like, won’t we, lads?’

Barraclough was a tough bastard, but there was always a weak place in a bully. Thankful of his time in the factory, Herbert yanked him up again, unable to bear Ashley’s pleas to be left alone, which seemed to humiliate Herbert even more.

He pressed the full tin of black polish hard over Barraclough’s spud-like nose, ashamed at the enjoyment it gave him. Ashley gathered energy at last, and sprang from the crowd only interested in the fight that was bound to follow such a rash action. He fastened his trousers and walked calmly out of the door.

Herbert stood, on the other bank of the Rubicon, in the clear space of the billet, refusing to consider the fact that he was no doubt a soft head for having interfered. Barraclough came at too much of a rush to do himself much good, and Herbert’s experience at boxing helped to send him down with little damage to either. A horseshoe of spectators limited his advantage of manoeuvre, and a fist that was difficult to avoid drove at his stomach, such a deliberate foul that he got a blow in at Barraclough’s face, blood streaming through the black smear. After a while of dodging and ducking, Barraclough’s retreat ended, and he came back to aim a paralysing kick.

Herbert’s instinct, honed for unarmed combat, twisted the leg with all his strength and, ignoring the scream of pain and surprise, sent his opponent sliding along the polished floor, breaking through the group of onlookers as if they were a posse of skittles. When Barraclough tried to move he kicked him in the ribs. ‘I never fought like that in the ring, but if you come at me ever again, or do anything to Pemberton, I’ll break your back.’

Some shouted that grub was up and it was time for tea, and at the loss of interest in anything but that, Barraclough pulled himself up, and hobbled after them. Herbert felt more alive than he had since leaving the factory, and wanted to say something conciliatory, but because Barraclough might take it as a weakness, he turned instead to Ashley, who had come back in to thank him. ‘You’d better stick with me, though I don’t think they’ll bother you again.’

He didn’t mind that he was disliked, couldn’t or wouldn’t play such tricks, or even laugh when they were done to others. Stand-offish and unpredictable, too keen at his training, an untouchable know-all, even the NCOs looked at him warily. They couldn’t place him, unable to find enough fault to get him on jankers. He knew exactly what expression to assume on being sneered or shouted at. The only person to beware of was his platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Snell, who at nineteen had been in the army a year longer than the rest. Because the officer plainly came out of a public school Herbert had to play the roughneck factory worker in case he should be sniffed out as being in any way similar. Luckily Snell couldn’t care less about being in the army, and was forever shooting off towards the delights of some popsy in London, happy at the wheel of his little Morgan. The men sensed his incompetence from the start, and with few exceptions referred to him as a bag of shit, with which judgment Herbert silently agreed.

When he applied for a day’s pass halfway through training the orderly sergeant flicked a mote off his row of medal ribbons; he had dandruff. ‘Your name, I knew a Thurgarton-Strang, in Burma. Any relation?’

Herbert regretted asking Isaac to rejig his Identity Card. ‘None, Sergeant.’

‘A real bastard, he was. But fair, very fair.’

A bus over the Downs took him to the bookshops of the south coast. At four and sixpence a day he could afford to be served with egg on toast or a cake on a plate in the tea shops of Chichester. On the way back he got off the bus and walked a mile or two along the footpath, to sit among the silent sheep and watch ships passing like ghosts in the misty Channel.

Far to the west beyond the green folds lay his first school, though he supposed the buildings were used for a different purpose now. Or they had fallen to pieces through ivy and neglect. With a notepad on his knee he wrote to his parents, telling them about his life since leaving school, knowing it was too late for his father to prise him from the drab khaki of a private soldier.

Eight weeks of summer training turned him into as good a soldier as he had been a machine-operator. When the sergeant-instructor went for a piss one day he came back to see Herbert showing slow coach Ashley Pemberton how to put the Bren together. He must have watched from behind a bush, Herbert surmised, who had not only named the parts but explained their function as he slotted them into place.

‘You know the lingo, as well,’ the sergeant said, as Ashley now assembled the gun with no trouble.

In a few weeks his lance-jack’s stripe came through, and he didn’t care that it distanced him even further from anyone who might have been friendly. Accustomed to being two people in the factory, he had turned more solitary now that he was one again, and he liked the feeling that relinquishing his guard separated him even more from those roundabout.

The others were surprised however when he joined a darts game in the NAAFI. The click of steel tips hitting grid wires was a sound hard to resist. Pint in hand, he watched for a while till a private said: ‘Fancy a throw, Corporal?’

‘Down from three-o-one?’

Barraclough sat nearby. ‘Watch he don’t cheat.’

‘I never do that.’ But he left him alone.

He won four games out of five, and rather than walk away with a pound in his pocket spent it on beer for those he had defeated. ‘Pints all round. Have one as well,’ he called to Barraclough. ‘No hard feelings.’

‘Ah, all right, you bugger.’

Halfway pleased at having broken through his guard, they wondered where a toffee-nosed hard case like him had learned to throw darts with such accuracy.

The few bob a day made him abstemious, verging on niggardly after his easy-going factory time. A few pounds saved out of his pay, and from his wages before enlisting, gave enough to lodge at Mrs Denman’s on his first leave, and to take Eileen out as well.

She loved her soldier Bert, who was more unlike one of the factory blokes than ever now that he had joined up. The loudmouth pose had never seemed natural to him, and now he was quiet and even polite, which led her to think he really loved her.

Herbert found it easy to get her up to the bedroom while Ralph was out at ‘business’. Disembodied from the everyday world, a feeling almost of sin at all other men being at work, he drew the curtains, took off his clothes and watched her do the same. She had pleaded a day off, but at other times she would rush from the factory in her dinner break to pass half an hour in his arms, no opportunity to eat anything before getting back to the factory. ‘I can live on love,’ she said.

He marvelled at the pale delicate skin of closed eyelids when she gave herself to him with loyal passion, and afterwards hinted at how their intimate courtship ought to become more formal now that he was a responsible adult in khaki. This turned him back into Bert, though only to himself. Not bleedin’ likely! He sensed in his deepest gut what she wanted. She craved that their togethering would go on forever, for them to be hugger-mugger in bed all night and every night, a situation in which he — her Bert — would get up, as he should in the morning, make his own breakfast, and go out to work, while she languished an extra half-hour because of her swelling belly. She would stand like a proud Daily Mirror mum with other women in the grocer’s queue to buy the weekly rations, then go back home to make the beds, wash up, and cook some slop for their supper. She could tek a running jump at herself — though he had to admit it was impossible not to believe they were profoundly attached, he in love with her, if she liked to put it that way.

And yet, like a blade of light straying around their most delicious joinings, he recalled his hopeless juvenile yearning for Rachel, saw her oval peach-coloured face and large blue eyes from behind the topiaristically sculptured bush and across the ‘Dig For Victory’ lettuce patch as she strolled so unwillingly with Dominic and her parents. At times he imagined going softly into her, in the depths of some wood on a hot summer’s day, she lying with legs as open as Eileen’s and giving kisses as welcoming. He would shudder into an ejaculation sooner than intended, but felt such a fantasy was worth it, and in any case not much time went by before he could rise again.

A long-term plan for seeing Rachel came to mind. She had pushed out a lizard tongue of contempt that first time, but almost seemed to like him after he had forced that little runt Dominic to make an introduction. She would be taller now, with shapely legs, and nice breasts (though not as big as Eileen’s) and would hold his arm in the most adoring way as she talked about paintings and the latest books he would by then have read. She would admire his quotations from Ovid, or look adoringly as he modestly related his adventures after coming back wounded — though not disabled — from some jungle or desert skirmish. The idea of never seeing her again made his heart ache miserably, putting him for a few minutes through a whirlpool of emotion he had thought himself too adult to bother with but which was relished for old times’ sake.

He certainly didn’t intend sinking as far down into the life of a factory chap as to marry Eileen, warm and wonderful though she was in bed. He anchored his expectations, and therefore hers, from one day to the next. Whatever notions she had of their future were no concern of his. He ignored her hints, open and more plangent towards the end of his leave, except for vague agreements as to the kind of life she longed for. Being silent but polite was the best way of getting her into bed without too much awkwardness, and at such times, which she mistook for the possibility of acquiescence towards his responsibilities, her simplicity and trust was guaranteed to give him a good time and, he was sure, to go by her cries and behaviour, satisfy her as well. He teased her about the dreams she related, long and tedious narratives that got nowhere.

‘I like to dream,’ she said. ‘Dreams mean summat, that’s why I tell ’em yer. Last night I dreamed you and me was looking at a house to live in.’

She wanted him to say how nice. ‘Lovely, duck. I dreamed I was walking over a frozen lake, and the ice gave way. It was ’orrible.’

‘Yo’ would, wouldn’t yer?’ But he couldn’t deflect her. She was, what was the word? — irrepressible. ‘I read horoscopes every day in the paper.’

‘And you believe in ’em?’

‘Course I do. They often come true. It might sound daft, but I like to.’

He didn’t care what she dreamed, or what she read, only wanting her to be happy in the way he wanted to be happy. She mostly was, or seemed to be, seeing that if not she might drive him away. He envied her, living on the edge of her nerves — and her experience. When she couldn’t help but be moody his annoyance was marked by an even deeper silence, which brought her to earth more quickly than any argument. She then tried to be more cheerful, assuming he was discontented at being a soldier, and at having to leave her when his furlough came to an end — just as any young man would be.

Archie called, his battledress bearing the shoulder flashes of the REMEs. Near the end of his leave and halfway bored, Herbert was glad to see him, and sat him down in Mrs Denman’s parlour. ‘Have a fag.’

‘I will but I’ve got this terrible thirst.’ He was slimmer, and there weren’t so many blackheads on his skin. In spite of his grousings about going into the forces he was as smart a soldier as drab khaki would allow. ‘The sooner we whistle up a drink the better.’

‘How you getting on in the army?’

‘Army? I’m back at school, learning how to mend fuses and roll telephone wire all over the shop at Catterick. I took a test to go on the course, and somebody said I must be intelligent when I passed. Me! Well, it ain’t too bad, a bit of a skive, though it might be useful later. There was nowt doing in camp this weekend, so I flitted for thirty-six hours. As long as the redcaps don’t stop me on the street and ask for my pass.’

Herbert hoped he was wrong in assuming that Archie had gone AWOL. ‘You’re going back, though, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I bleedin’ well am. King George wouldn’t like it if I didn’t.’

They went to Yates’s Wine Lodge and found a table in the gallery. Archie fished for his paybook and unfolded a paper. ‘I’ve got a leave pass, because I slipped one o’ the bone idle orderly room penpushers half a crown for it. But it needs somebody’s signature, otherwise it ain’t valid.’ He passed it across. ‘Just sign it for me, Bert. I’d do it myself, except the red caps ’ud spot the writing of a numbskull like me straight away. Any road, you’re a lance-jack. You know how to do it.’

Herbert drained his jar to gain time. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll get stopped. It’d be a million to one chance. Another pint?’

‘Yeh. But it’ll look better if it’s signed. Just put RSM somebody or other. I’d never nark if it got twigged.’

Herbert came back with the drinks, set them down, and took out his pen to scribble his father’s name on the form, demoting him to the rank of captain. ‘How’s Sheila, these days?’

‘Sheila? Going back a bit, aren’t yer? I’ve got somebody else now.’

‘How’s that?’

‘She wanted to get engaged. Went all mam and dad on me. So I towd her to piss off.’

Herbert laughed. So that was how you did it.

‘She said she’d wait till I got out of the army, but I towd her I worn’t interested. What’s the point gerrin’ married?’

‘None at all,’ Herbert agreed. ‘Let’s ’ave another.’

‘Any time. But drop me a line now and again.’

‘Sure. I’ll do that.’

The names of wild flowers came back to him from school, but there weren’t so many around Nottingham, being shy in chill July. He told Eileen what some of them were, when she asked because she didn’t know what else to say as she warmed her failing spirit by pressing against his shoulder. They walked down a lane and into a field, on the last day of his leave.

‘It ain’t the end of the world, duck.’

Nothing he could say would help because for her it was, or she thought it was, which must be the same. She had hardly noticed flowers before except poppies, which wanted to reach out to her from an age when she had caught sight of them with such delight on a school outing ten years ago, and had run from the bus to pick one by the head, blood red and fragile till blown into the grass where she let it be. ‘I could kill myself, I feel so rotten.’

We’ll go back to the river, then, and you can jump in, if I don’t throw you in first. I’ll light a cigarette, and stand under the trees to watch you sink. Why can’t you live from day to day like me and just enjoy the good fucks we have now and again?

A carpet of morning glory covered a hedge with white trumpets, some open and others closed, so maybe there’s a chance of no rain, he thought, if that’s what it means. The edge of the field was their horizon, but they stopped under a great elm. ‘Don’t think like that,’ he said. ‘You’ll have me crying in a bit, and soldiers aren’t supposed to.’

‘But I love you,’ she told him, ’and soldiers go away, and get killed.’ A lime-green and black dotted ladybird settled on her lip. She brushed it away. ‘Or summat else ’appens, and they don’t come back.’

Here’s one that won’t, if you go on like this, and if I have any say in the matter. ‘Of course, soldiers come back. I will, you can bet, and you know why I will?’

‘No, I don’t.’

He unbuttoned his battledress and lay it on the grass for this princess of the workbench. Walter Raleigh had nothing on him. ‘Because I love you, that’s why. You mean more to me than anybody else in the world.’ Pushing out all the pretence of Bert Gedling, he gave in to a feeling of luxury, and spoke as the words came out of his heart. ‘I’ve never been as close to anyone as I am to you, and I never will be. I know that. You’re the best person in the world, not one better anywhere.’ He couldn’t stop himself, didn’t see why he should, because every word was true. ‘I loved you the first minute I saw you in the factory, and I love you now a hundred times more than I did then, if that’s possible.’

No effect. It was a more solid sign she wanted, a tawdry pawnshop engagement ring sliding on to her finger. Even if he had one he wouldn’t know which one to put it on, thought of walking away, the tragic swain rejected though all his poetry had been spoken. His feet wouldn’t move, and he didn’t want them to. ‘I love you. I can’t say any more than that.’

So many tears that the shoulder of his shirt was wet. The tap runneth over. Her eyes were illuminated with misery and determination. ‘If you love me. Is that all?’

‘I’ll be back, you know that.’

She sat down, her legs shaking, the skirt lifted to show shapely white ankles. ‘I took the day off work specially to be with you.’

The ultimate sacrifice. He passed a clean handkerchief. The ring could wait. Words would be enough. No one was going to control his fate — if he could help it. ‘I’m glad you did. I appreciate it.’

A fist struck at his leg, hurting her more than him, he was sure. ‘Don’t talk like that. Appreciate! Appreciate! You don’t mean it, I know you don’t, using words like that. Who are you, anyway? You don’t talk like anybody else. There’s summat fishy about you.’

Not me, duck. You’re Pisces, and I’m Taurus. He wondered if she hadn’t cooked all this up as a way of getting shut of him, a cunning route through the jungle of her self-preservation. The thought chilled him, for a moment. To tell somebody to push off for good all you had to do was disagree on a basic issue, such as liking a different film star, or another sort of food, or saying you didn’t care for a certain place, or even a particular colour in a dress. That way you also gave whoever it was a reason to get rid of you. With primitive people of inferior intelligence you had to agree with everything, otherwise the union wasn’t viable.

If he sank himself into the foreordained scheme of marital captivity he would give her a few kids and abandon her in five years, really ruining her life. The very picture made him want to say yes, let’s get engaged and then married and we’ll find a room, a flat, a house with a garden, and after the army I’ll pack it in at the factory and get a cleaner job elsewhere and in a few years I’ll love you even more and you’ll change so completely by being with me that people will think we came out of the same drawer. Then I’ll light off, beat it with spectacular suddenness, utterly unexpected, and it’ll be a lot worse if we’ve had kids because you’ll never hear from me again and you’ll be scrubbing floors to feed them.

Perhaps she picked up the best of the reflections, for when he sat down all hope left her and she held him in a burning embrace, and they made the best love ever, he decided, at the crying out when she came.

Looking up, he saw the large melancholy head of a cow with big purple eyes fixed on them from over the hedge. Definitely not, he said to himself, unpeeling the frenchie before turning to help her, though minutes passed before he could stop her crying.

Back in camp a letter was waiting from Brigadier Thurgarton-Strang, in reply to one Herbert had written on joining up. His parents were on their way home by troopship and would get to Southampton in a month. As soon as Herbert could wangle a forty-eight hour pass they would like to see him and talk things over and please find the cheque inside for twenty-five pounds — a month’s wages at the factory, and about three months as a soldier. He smiled, looking at it back and front before slotting it into his wallet for use in an emergency, though thinking he might not cash it at all.

Strangers were demanding his reappearance in a stage play he had walked out of years ago. What did they want to see him for? Who were they, in any case? Who was he, come to that? He felt a mix-up of curiosity and resentment, at the idea of meeting people who had abandoned him for seven years. He wouldn’t even know what they looked like, nor they him, as if arranging a rendezvous by a lion in Trafalgar Square with someone you’d never seen, so that you might stand a few yards apart fruitlessly waiting for hours. Lord Nelson high above would recognize him before they did. Still, they were his parents, or claimed to be, so he had to respond to their curt summons, acknowledging that at least the cheque had been generous.

But should he go? Hard to say. In Nottingham he could have talked the matter over with Isaac, though in the end the decision would be his and nobody else’s. It wasn’t worthy of a grown-up to be uncertain when a brigadier wants to see you. There was nothing to do but, as with headmaster or foreman, do it with neither thought nor malice.

London was familiar, and he walked as if the streets belonged to him. You could still tell the place had been bombed, odd corners roped off, brambles proliferating behind wire fencing. Gower Street was shabby, but he supposed it always had been. Smells of petrol, coal smoke and plaster dust enriched the air. At eighteen he felt superior to everyone, a soldier with creases as sharp as his reactions in dealing with traffic when crossing the road, disdaining green lights and Belisha beacons. Boots were blackened to the utmost shine, gaiters blancoed, and a belt buckle that winked at whatever young secretary, darting from a door on the way to get her sandwich for lunch, might glance back at him.

The Underground train rattled along to Notting Hill Gate. He stood without strap-hanging, well enough balanced and controlled to stay upright at the stops and starts. Most of the people looked worn out, so closed in on themselves he wondered if they weren’t, in the words of Mrs Denman, sickening for something.

He found the place easily on his map, a small but three-storied cottage kind of house in a street south of the main road. Within the railings two wooden tubs stood by the door, each holding an evergreen. Herbert adjusted his cap — though there was no need — to conceal his hesitation, not willing to put a hand on the knocker. He saw himself walk smartly away, a jolt to the heart at such a move, for he would never afterwards make contact. But they’d know where to find him, so escape was impossible. It would be easier and more sensible to meet them.

He detected regret in the man who opened the door, at not having a skivvy to do the job. Times had changed. There were no servants now, at least not in this country, unless you were a millionaire or in the Labour Government, his father’s expression seemed to say. Herbert was led into a parlour whose bay window fronted the street. ‘Maybe we’ll have someone to look after us when we get back to the old place in Norfolk.’

‘When will that be?’

‘I’ll be out next year. And then we’ll see. Meanwhile this doll’s house costs ten pounds a week. Sit down, my boy, and let’s have a look at you. I hope you don’t mind sandwiches for lunch?’

Herbert’s head was level with that of this erect oldish bloke of nearly sixty who claimed to be his father, bald but for a few grey strands, a returning trace of rubicund in his face after the sea voyage. He removed his beret and stared into his father’s grey eyes. ‘Not at all, sir.’

Hugh smiled. Mufti or not, you could tell he was a soldier, straight and slender, head seemed more inclined to the ceiling than to anybody else’s level. He held Herbert’s right hand with both of his, instead of returning the handshake that was offered. ‘Do you know, my boy, we were never worried when you bolted.’ He spoke as if the escape was yesterday, though maybe it was to him. ‘We were surprised at first, a little annoyed, I won’t say we weren’t, but that was about all. I always dreamed of doing it from my school, but never had the initiative to carry it out. It was good of you to let us know so soon, though. The first thing I did was write to your school and tell ’em they weren’t to go after you. Don’t suppose they liked it, but they must have known better than to argue.’

Herbert smiled, at what must have been the longest ever speech from his father. All his fears about being caught had been for nothing. Bugger it! — almost came to his lips, though he considered his chagrin unjustified because, on looking back, it seemed he had rather enjoyed being a fugitive. ‘It was good of you to take it like that.’

They sat as if both were too big for the armless chintz-covered chairs. ‘Well, I didn’t think it would do you any harm, especially when you wrote and said you were working in a factory. Everything helps to make a man of a boy as long as he puts his back into it.’

Herbert struggled for a moment to keep his accent from straying. ‘I liked the life.’

‘I’m sure you did. A lot of my chaps came from such places in the Great War, as well as in this one. We had a few bad eggs, but most of them did well. And when they did well, there were none better.’

Expecting a shouting at, he felt at a loss, glad when the half-shut door was kicked open and the woman he supposed would turn out to be his mother came in with a tray of cups and saucers. Thick grey hair was tied back, showing her strong profile, and a string of brown beads fell over the white blouse covering a sloping bosom.

She must have known he had been in the house five minutes already, so had been waiting to compose herself for the moment of reunion or, more like it, hadn’t thought it necessary to break off what she was doing; the latter more likely, because pride grew out of her bone marrow.

‘I even have to learn how to make coffee — though I always could, you know.’ She set the tray on a shining walnut wood table between them. The crockery rattled, a sign of nervousness at the longed for meeting, he could only suppose. ‘How are you, Herbert? It’s been so long, such a dreadful time, not being able to see you. You were quite a small boy …’

‘Hadn’t started to grow,’ Hugh laughed.

He had already stood up, as you did when someone came into the room. She grasped his forearms, and he was embarrassed at the fervent kiss, at her eyes glistening with love and recognition, a definite tear in one of them. He hoped she didn’t notice the drawing back in his heart and hands. Could he believe she had dreamed of this reunion for years?

‘I can see you’re well,’ she said, ’and I can’t tell you how glad I am that you are. Apart from the height you’ve not changed a bit. You’re the replica of your father when he was your age. Isn’t he, Hugh? Just look at him.’

‘Is he?’ He smoothed his moustache, the first real pleasure he had shown.

She touched his arm. ‘How much sugar, Herbert?’

‘Two, please.’

They sat without talking for a while, so much to tell that nothing would come out. Maud knew it wasn’t done not to say a word or two. ‘You look a very smart soldier, but I do wish you’d go in for a commission, Herbert. It would be natural for you. You’re our only child, and we want you to do well.’

‘We’ll have lunch, and talk about that afterwards.’ Hugh dangled his watch, spun the chain around a long finger, then threaded it into his waistcoat. ‘I suppose we can fix him up with a show this evening? That’s what I always liked to do in London.’

Maud picked up the Daily Telegraph. ‘There’s The Gang Show at the Stoll. Not very much really. What about Song of Norway?’

‘Bit musicky, isn’t it?’ Hugh said.

‘Well, there’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the pictures. Shakespeare, Herbert?’

‘Expect you got that rammed down your throat at school, didn’t you?’ Hugh winked.

He smiled. If they sat in the cinema it would be two hours when he wouldn’t need to talk. ‘Well, yes, but all the same I’d like to see it.’ He turned to his mother. ‘That’d be fine.’

‘All right,’ Hugh said. ‘Might be just the thing.’ He stroked Maud’s wrist, and Herbert noticed his loving smile. ‘Vivien Leigh’s damned good to look at.’

‘That’s settled, then.’

Herbert knew he couldn’t berate them any more for shovelling him into those dreadful schools, but neither did he feel any flush of returning affection. He’d have to go back too far for that, to his infancy in India when they mooned over him with so much pleasure and, he now realized, spoiled him rotten. His heart was like a stone, as if he’d just come back from its funeral. ‘I don’t intend to sign on in the army,’ he told them at lunch. ‘All I want is the experience for two or three years. After that, I’ll decide what to do.’

Hugh’s fingers drummed some garbled message on to the table, while Maud worked at her beads, looking to the window as if a solution to the situation might show itself in the glass. ‘I suppose we can at least be pleased at the way you seem to chew things over before you speak,’ Hugh said.

She stacked the plates to clear the table. ‘Well, that’s just like you, isn’t it, dear?’

His father could be as sarcastic as he liked. Nothing would alter his mind. Not that he knew what his mind was. He didn’t much care, being on Fate’s conveyor belt, and he could do nothing about that even if he wanted to. Neither, therefore, could they, which suited him fine. You could hardly expect such old parents to understand. At the same time he was beginning to feel so much part of them that there was nothing more to be said or done, except do exactly as he bloody well liked. Time in the factory had strengthened his will against intimidation. If they thought to change his mind later about their ideas for his future they would be thwarted because a troopship would soon be taking him to he didn’t know where, a place he hoped would be as far from them as he could possibly get, Japan for preference.

Eight

He walked across the deck for a change in the view, bracing a leg at each step, to find that the opposite horizon had the same aspect of violence and colour, coming equally close at the tilt of the ship, but he felt the world to be his, and that he was part of it, feet solid on the wood, in harmony with the world on water, body invulnerable. He had never felt better, or more himself or, more to the point, that he had no interest in who he was, merely that he was separated as far as could be from his past yet was part of a moving organization in which he had for the time being found refuge.

A light from France flickered white as the troopship made a long turn towards Biscay. ‘We’re on our way,’ Pemberton said.

‘I’m glad. You?’

In the last months Pemberton had lost the oversensitive uncertainty of his mouth. The light had gone out of his eyes, the quick movement that remained due more to self-preservation among the mob than from any kind of fear. ‘All right. Neither good nor bad, philosophically speaking. Things just are.’

Herbert smiled, and asked if he wasn’t leaving a nice girl behind.

‘You don’t meet girls when you’re swatting for Higher School Cert. The girls in the office were difficult to approach, though there’s one I write to. We’re just friends.’

‘You mean you’ve never had one?’

‘Had one?’

‘Well, I think if the fucking boat turned a somersault, and a fish floated up with your number on it — would you be very happy knowing you’d never shagged a girl?’ Pemberton looked blank: what you hadn’t had you can hardly regret. ‘Though I suppose’, Herbert went on, a stiffened arm stopping him getting cracked ribs at the rail, while Pemberton weathered it with some fancy twitching of the feet, ‘that if you have had it you regret dying even more in knowing you’ll never have it again.’

‘I imagine that’s the case,’ Pemberton said. ‘But I’m going down to find my hammock, before I start to feel queasy.’

Herbert was also sad to be leaving, so could relish the best of both states. He took Eileen’s letter from his battledress pocket for another musing read. Now that she hated him, and wished he would — as if such a journey would somehow scare him — ‘go to bleeding hell’, he imagined himself still half in love, though no more so in yearning for her warm body and cow-like generous trust to be with him now. Maybe he would get a reply off at Gibraltar, asking her to think again, wait for him, even to forgive, though he didn’t know what for.

A shudder of regret was meaningless to the waves, which was no bad thing. He was on his own at last. The opposite rail started its exorable lift, beams and girders taking the strain. Rain hit the portholes like gravel, peppering the superstructure. He put the letter into his notebook and, before it could get wet, slotted it back into his pocket; then zigzagged into the dimly lit other ranks’ saloon.

Bumping between the crowd showed no place to sit. For a while he stood with his legs apart to counteract the swaying. Fag smoke and diesel smells weeded out all but the strongest stomachs. Barraclough put down his unfinished half-pint and, with muslin features, pushed by on his way to be sick.

When the sun shone from a clear sky off the coast of Spain he sat among hundreds on the open deck to relish the cruise. Passing Cape Trafalgar, a sandy-looking bluff in the distance, he opened his notebook to write up the log of his travels. A copy of the farewell missive from Eileen rested there, as well as his reply. He pulled both out and tore them into the smallest pieces possible, and watched them blow away from the stern like snow, a confetti that disappointed the gulls. She had callously reminded him of what he didn’t need to know, that there were a lot more pebbles on the beach. Being compared to a pebble irritated him beyond endurance, especially since he was one of a thousand on this three-funnelled troopship heading for some outpost of the Empire.

The Med was stormier than Biscay, and his stomach wasn’t too steady, so he was glad to clatter down the companionway to the bottom of the ship for bulkhead duty, a paperback snatched from the library in his back pocket. So far below, he was clear of the sea-howl, stew-reek and diesel stench that thickened in the air of upper decks.

The steel doors either side were to be rammed shut if a mournful death-in-the-heart signal indicated that the sea had broken in. Very comforting, he thought, but practical. The bottom length of the ship was divided into compartments, each to be made separate and watertight so that if rock was struck or a stray mine left from the war brought in the floor the vessel would stay afloat. Crippled but viable, it might even make a few knots, which kind of mechanics made firm sense. The sergeant of the watch came striding in. ‘Not supposed to have your nose in a book when on guard, are we?’

‘Sorry, Sergeant.’

He winked, passing close. ‘Don’t do it, or you’ll get me shot with shit. If you hear that klaxon it’s not because Sheffield Wednesday’s scored a goal. Just wind them doors shut, or we’ll be floating like tiddlers in a bowl. Your reading days will be over if you don’t, and so will mine. What’s it called?’

He turned to the front page. ‘A Room with a View, Sergeant.’

His pale face came near to laughter. ‘No fucking view down here!’ And went on his way.

Dereliction of duty — damn it, he murmured, getting the book back from his pocket. He wouldn’t let the novel be invaded by his present situation, had stopped regarding himself as the perfect soldier since forging his father’s name on Archie’s pass. Every spin of the ship’s screws was taking him forward on a mystery trip, but wherever it ended up he would still be himself. A burst of sea water into the bulkhead suggested panic if he allowed the possibility, though as far as his mind went it was easy to control, the mind being like the ship itself, unsinkable, kept going by its many lockable compartments. If something threatening rushed in you could shut it off, and live in those that were clear of disturbance.

All the same, maybe there was something behind the closed doors that he didn’t know about but should. Any door invited opening. You couldn’t batter it down to find out — cut your way in, claw steel and shavings away. Such bulkhead doors, or doors of the mind, you had to wait for them to give way or open up of their own accord to reveal the mysteries. No room with a view in the bowels of the ship. The sergeant was right. There was no fucking view anywhere, until you got clear and made your own.

By the last hour of the watch in the dimly lit depths he knew that the terror of what wasn’t yet known was only another manifestation of normal life, inflicted by the imagination in the stifling warmth. Strict control of the brain was as much necessary as guidance from the bridge keeping the ship from all obstacles, whether on the surface or half-sunken. Jonah in the whale could only keep calm and wait.

‘That grey blob over there must be Pantelleria.’ Pemberton also had a map. ‘It certainly doesn’t look up to much.’

It had, at one time, to Herbert. ‘Maybe there are some nice girls there, though, and a lit up café, with a band outside playing stirring Italian music.’ Steaming by the island before, he had wanted to throw himself overboard and swim there, or drown on the way, having been told he was to be left at school in England. The pathetic little boy in short trousers sobbing at the rail was an image best forgotten, and he wondered why it had come to undermine him as he turned to watch a school of dolphins making scimitar curves out of the water, the boat track no doubt crossing that of Aeneas on his way to found Rome after leaving Dido to her fate.

‘Sounds good,’ Pemberton said. ‘Maybe we’ll end up in an even more exotic place, holding the fort somewhere in the Far East, a real Joseph Conrad backwater.’

But after ten days steaming from Blighty they were stepping down the gangplank on to a lighter at Port Said, going ashore with the rest of the regiment. Talk of a Cyprus posting left Herbert discontented, galled at cheers from the ship as it weighed anchor and steered off down the ruler-straight waterway for India and Singapore.

The close, unforgettable odours of the ship were changed for the sun, sand and sewerage smells of a transit camp near Ismailya, a two-month limbo of waiting. Set to guard an enormous encampment of stores, Herbert one midnight prodded a ragbag thief into the guardroom at bayonet point. The man was shivering with fear, and rage at having been caught nicking what he looked on as belonging to him by birthright, hardly able to lift the motor tyre he’d tried to purloin, which Herbert made him carry.

‘Another bugger,’ the redcap sergeant behind the desk said. ‘That makes three tonight. God knows what they do with ’em back there. Give ’em a bloody good pasting and let them go, I shouldn’t wonder. You can’t stop it. There’s five born every minute in this fucking country, and each of ’em’s got ten thieving fingers.’

From then on Herbert let marauding shadows slide away on velvet feet, and took no action.

There was nothing else to do but put up with boredom beyond all experience, even to the stage of a cultivated emptying of the mind in the hope that time would take off its clogs and whizz along on bare feet. Pemberton passed him a magazine of current affairs called Compass, read and re-read till it fell from Herbert’s hand in light-brown flakes.

The sea was calm on the short run to Limassol. Disembarked, they sat in a lorry, kit and rifles heaped by shining boots. The exhaust marked a track from the port, through town and across a dusty plain, much honking around bullock carts, and drab-garbed women in the middle of the road who took little notice. From a bend Herbert saw the mountains had come closer, green with groves and orchards, streaks of snow still on the summits, light green on nearer spurs, a jumble of re-entrants. The view was like paradise, but halfway towards it the driver took a fork and brought them back to a vast area of tents not far from the coast.

When the six hundred men were moved from place to place, an exercise of seeming pointlessness, all complained at being fed up, fucked up, and far from home. The eternal grumbles were raved out with melancholy humour, better that way, Herbert felt, because otherwise they would be inclined to go out on a binge of mayhem and murder, and so would I, he mused, knowing himself better off for being in tune on that point at least.

More training, though with less obvious bullshit, and more sentry-go, all compounded into more and more boredom, unless he laid hands on a paperback book or two from a stall in Nicosia, detritus from those who had already come and gone, not even to be haggled for, thrown across for a few of the local akkers. As the weeks slid by it seemed as if the colonel was going mad with the map, shifting them here there and everywhere. At least the landscape changed, though the island wasn’t so big, and eyes soon lost their sense of wonder. Moving numbers to more purpose would call for the unravelling and joining together of subtle organizational threads beyond their capabilities, though much time was devoted to trying, with a talent that in Herbert’s view never seemed more than mediocre.

At times he wondered whether he wouldn’t have been more content as a commissioned officer, but soon enough doubted it. Being that much singled out had no appeal for him, and to land himself closer to the scene of control would have made him even more exasperated and contemptuous. He lacked the tolerance to understand how time could be squandered and energies blighted. The more hours NCOs spent in offices performing their administrative duties the more was life made dull all around.

Yet he was happy enough being a soldier. His limited experience of other states told him this one was one of the best, interesting, exciting even, when waiting didn’t milk the élan out of the platoon’s morale. Existence came close to real life, and was a lot improved when echeloning up a hillside between black goats whose neck bells told the umpire over the rocky crest that they were on their way, all surprise gone. Moving at speed between the trees was also mindless, but it was better than sitting around a lorry in the wrong gully, that the driver had brought them to because he couldn’t read a bloody map.

They infiltrated remoter parts of the mountains looking for no one knew what, a sense of realism provided by living off what they carried, and occasionally for a day on almost nothing because no lorry turned up at the rendezvous. When there was a lorry they were glad to sleep by its huge presence, as if the vehicle was alive and would give comfort and protection. ‘God knows why we’re doing all this,’ Pemberton said, spreading his groundsheet.

‘Best not to wonder.’

A wind flipped through the branches of the pines. ‘I can’t help it. The people here want Enosis. They want to belong to Greece. They’ll be fighting us about it one day — in a few years. I’ll bet Byron would be on their side.’

‘You don’t say?’ He wanted to laugh. ‘You mean “The Isles of Greece”, and all that Missolonghi stuff? Well, Byron’s dead, and it’s different now.’ He had read in a pamphlet that the Phoenicians came to the island first, followed by Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, and then Turks who had lost it to the British. ‘Anyway, what difference would it make?’

‘It’ll mean a lot to them,’ Pemberton said, ‘the people who live here.’

Months passed in eating, sleeping, reading when you could, smoking what fags were available, doing your duty with as little effort as possible, and saying nothing. ‘Let’s get our heads down. We have to relieve the others in a couple of hours.’

When under canvas, or at the NAAFI at some base near a town, or in hutments if they were lucky, he leaned with notebook on knee and recollected his Nottingham period. The year, in memory so rich, had elasticated into a decade. A good time, now that he looked back. All good, not a day dead, more at home than he had been anywhere — at least since leaving India at seven, and that didn’t count any more. On his last visit Maud had come out with the phrase ‘wage slave’, and though he was glad she had been human enough to let the term drop against her intention, he thought it much better to be a wage slave than a soldier — though however you were occupied he supposed you were a slave to whoever paid you. Soldier or wage slave, it was certainly better than being a slave to your own confusions, during these long bouts of idleness and waiting, though you might just as well accept time on its own terms and go with the drift. In the factory there was little tolerance for such uncertainties and quite rightly, because you were sweating to fatten your pay packet which, while you were at work, was all that mattered. Existence then was as close to perfection as it was possible to get, because it was so plain and simple, and only a fool could imagine there was any state on earth that could be called perfection.

Pemberton plonked himself down and opened his book. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

‘Push off. You’re breaking my train of thought.’

‘We’re on War Department property. I can sit where I like.’

‘Any news this morning?’

‘Nobody tells you anything, and when they do it’s an unfounded rumour. Those who start them have weird imaginations. I’ve stopped asking when we’re moving.’

He counted six birds in a row along the telephone wire. ‘Maybe they know something.’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ Pemberton said. ‘All I know is we’ve been here six months, and that leaves us with another year before humping it back to Blighty.’

‘Back to the office, eh? Carry on penpushing.’

‘Suppose so. I don’t think my parents will be glad to see me. They hope I’ll stay in, in fact. I had a letter from my mother this morning and, wait for it, my parents are getting a divorce.’

‘Lucky devil!’

‘After twenty-five years, though. Would you believe it? My father’s the manager of an insurance firm, and apparently he’s been carrying on a bit too long with a popsy who works there. Mother has lost patience at last. And it’s not the first time he’s been at such tricks.’

‘I suppose in some way you might say good luck to him.’ He couldn’t tell whether Pemberton was sad about it or not, though supposed he ought to be, somehow. Such news wouldn’t have affected him one bit. His parents seemed as if crayoned on to cardboard, his last visits completely unreal, when they should have been defining moments of his life. In their last letter his mother asked whether he wouldn’t like to do something or other at Oxford when he got demobbed. What would he do at a place like that? Do nothing at all. Get into trouble, and go to the dogs. She must have thought he’d just sit there and knit.

Hugh’s view, in a later letter, was that while it might be a good experience for him to be getting some experience in the ranks, he wondered if he wouldn’t sooner than later like to have a commission and make the army his career. He’ll never stop harping on it, Herbert thought, resenting the fact that it made him angry. He pictured his mother going over his father’s letter and putting it in such lucid terms. They were a conspiracy sent on earth to give him life, and then try everything to ruin it. He could only go on respecting them if he didn’t let them do it. He saw no future in the army, and in his reply mentioned neither of these possibilities, thinking it strange how little they knew about him even though he was their son — and how easy he was able to put them out of his mind for months at a time.

Pemberton looked up from his book. ‘Maybe I’ll stay in the army, though. I’m getting to like the life.’

‘Why not? You could even get a commission.’

‘You think so?’

‘No one more suitable. You had such a horrible beginning.’ They laughed together. ‘You’re a funny old sod, Ashley. I can’t understand why you joined the army in the first place. You’d have been better off with the Brylcreem Boys.’

‘I did get called up, you know. There was no choice.’

‘Got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. There’s only me.’

‘Hard luck. Same here. Let’s go inside for some more coffee.’

Of all the duties the one he hated most was guarding the camps of the Jews, who were being prevented from going to Palestine. Destiny was keeping him in a grip which there was no possibility of breaking out of, but he did not want to be a gaoler, or a policeman. A soldier had to feel as well as know who an enemy was, and nobody thought these people were. All they wanted to do was go where they weren’t allowed, and it made no sense to stop them — though it was no business of his. It was a duff job, being a guardian of the Empire, to which no real soldiering was attached at all.

Routine was the enemy, an unending roster of sentry-go that corroded the spirit, made you feel dirty and useless, an automaton. One day he had to deliver a wad of lists to the administration office, and the sergeant made out a pass which allowed him to go through the camp itself. He walked at his smartest, one of the elect only because he wasn’t a civilian, and this was an unexpected effort because he was escorted by a cloud of flies. They landed on him everywhere. They were all he saw, all he felt. They tormented him like the Erinyes. He wanted to murder them, hoped they would magically perish, thought a giant mobile Flit-barrel of deadly gas was about right, except that it would be too good for them. He could only pity the tens of thousands in the camps who had to endure such a plague all the hours of daylight. It was eyes front as if they didn’t exist, difficult to look at anyone if he was to keep his stance and not run helplessly off course from the continual thousand-Stuka raids.

After delivering the papers and when halfway back, he stopped by a door as if to adjust his cap, unable for a moment to go on, and not being too sure of which direction to go for the main gate. A woman called to him from inside the hut, and turning gave another excuse to brush off the flies which seemed to be eating him alive. ‘Come in here,’ he heard.

One step backwards, and quickly into the hut, which seemed free of flies, but was no miracle because the reek of DDT almost pushed him out again. The walls were lined with bunks, from floor to ceiling, as he had seen in the pictures of German concentration camps, but these were clean and in smart enough order, though for the moment unoccupied. ‘The people are out in work parties.’ She had read his mind. ‘Putting up tents for others.’

In the light, so much dimmer than the glare outside, he saw a slender fair-haired woman of about forty, with dry brownish skin, sitting at a cardtable. She folded the papers of a letter. ‘Can I trust you?’

He smiled at a question no one had ever asked so openly — you might say brazenly — before. He hoped it hadn’t been because they were afraid to get the wrong answer. No fraternizing was the regulation, but instant obedience had been forgotten in the pragmatical world of the factory and its surrounding life, and it hadn’t yet worn off. In any case, no was beginning to seem like yes to him. ‘Of course. Why, though?’

She licked the envelope with a precise little tongue, and looked up, saying in an accent he assumed was German: ‘I’m going to ask you to post this letter for me.’

‘Can’t you do it yourself?’ Maybe they weren’t allowed. He’d heard something about it. Or their mail was opened and read, which he thought nobody had a right to do in peacetime. Anyway, you couldn’t argue, because if a woman asked you to do her a favour you did it, unless it was to commit suicide. ‘All right. Of course.’

‘There’s no stamp,’ she said, as if it were a matter for bitter regret.

Perhaps they had no money, though that was unlikely; or no way of buying them, which was possible. The place wasn’t provided with a nice clean post office, flowerbeds all round, and that was a fact. Since coming into the hut he’d felt a mad wish to laugh out loud. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll stick one on. Where’s it to?’

‘Palestine.’ The address was in Hebrew as well as English. ‘But will you be sure to do it?’

Impossible to know what made him say yes, or why she had chosen him. In the lottery of passers-by he’d been the one, he supposed. His eyes stung from the disinfectant, and he wondered how she endured it, and hoped she wouldn’t think the tears at one of his eyes meant he was upset about anything. Nothing on earth to get upset about — and even halfway through the gesture he felt a strong urge to change his mind because it might be taken by her as demeaning — he opened his cigarette case and passed three across, while taking the envelope from the table. It fitted safely in his pocket. ‘I’ll see it gets there.’

A gold tooth showed when she smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He turned to go. ‘And also for the cigarettes.’ At such politeness he went back to the table and, seeing one already between her lips, laid a box of matches down. Another insane action, felt himself colouring from shame at her having to accept them. He wanted to say ‘L’chaim!’ but didn’t because he would be embarrassed at seeming to get too familiar. Instead he gave a sloppy kind of salute, which brought a look of amazement — or was it amusement? — to her face already half obscured by cigarette smoke. Then he swung on his heels and went back to the flies and sunlight.

He stood at the door for a moment to orientate himself towards the main gate. A sergeant came by. ‘You been talking to the people in there, corporal?’ he said, though in a not much caring tone.

Bouncing between euphoria and undeniable pity, he kept a hard face. ‘Somebody called out.’ He held up his wrist. ‘Wanted the time of day.’

‘And did they thank you for it?’

‘You’re kidding. Told me I was a swine, and so was the whole British Army.’

They walked on together. ‘And what did you say to that?’

He waited till a pair of low-flying planes had got into the distance. ‘Told ’em to fuck off.’

‘That’s the ticket. We’ve just got to do what we’re told, and they don’t allow for that.’

‘Can’t, I suppose,’ Herbert said, wanting to laugh.

Off duty in the evening he walked a mile to the village, a glass of resinated red his intention. Opposite the café was a post box, which reminded him of the letter. He took stamps from his wallet and put it, with one for Archie, into the slit. Had he done it because he wanted a pat on the back from old Isaac? Certainly not. He would never mention it, even supposing he ever saw him again. You didn’t want approval for any such deeds. Not done. Not easy ones like that, anyway. Nor did you angle for disapproval of the bad deeds, either. Maybe it was a letter to her husband, or to a young man bewitched by her.

Other units were given the job of guarding the camp, and life was more interesting again, at times even pleasant. Cyprus was a neutral ground where he could think of the past without rancour, and the future without anxiety. He spent his leave on a camp on the Troodos Mountains — four beds to a room, plain walls, and plain service. But there was solitude, and paths between the tall pines to walk along. He took a packed lunch, and no map, and lost his way, but instinct for the lie of the land always got him back for dinner.

On a day when he stayed in the complex to read and rest he was disturbed by Mrs Plater, who ran the place. ‘When you first looked at me, as you passed on your way to the huts after booking in, I could see you holding your nose in the air, as if you thought I might try and pick you up.’

‘An involuntary scratch,’ he said. ‘It was rather the other way round, I think,’ though it hadn’t been, and she may have been right, if anything had been on his mind at all. He couldn’t remember. In the NAAFI at Berengaria he’d heard a Brylcreem Boy of the air force, with a signals flash on his shoulder, waffle out to his mates over some issue or other, that he ‘couldn’t care less’. He said it several times, as did the others. It seemed their favourite, most well-used phrase. Once Herbert’s contempt at such an attitude had dissipated he knew that beneath his disciplined attachment to duty he felt much the same, in everything, though it was not a philosophy, he realized, that any Thurgarton-Strang would want to be caught dead with.

It was the middle of the morning, and he sat in the canteen with a pint of orange juice. Mrs Plater, a cigarette smouldering, came back and put her coffee on the table. ‘Still don’t mind if I join you?’

‘Of course not, Mrs Plater. I’m honoured.’

Her throaty laugh echoed around the room. ‘That’s the sort of welcome I like to hear. Call me Alice, though.’

‘I mean it. Life gets so dull.’

‘You could go for walks. They’re lovely around here.’

‘I’ve done them all.’ He had also been to Othello’s tower in Famagusta, walking the battlements and looking with pleasure at ships in the harbour, sitting to eat his sandwich, and read about the place from a guidebook Pemberton had found on his assiduous browsing. ‘Busman’s holiday, walking. In any case, I thought I’d save my feet today.’

A hand was close to his, too blatant, he wanted to pull away, but couldn’t cause offence. Then it wasn’t blatant enough, and to withdraw his hand was unthinkable. He didn’t know what took place in that converting moment, only that, when her periwinkle blue eyes looked at him, litmus paper flared between them. A fly alighted on the sugar, set for a feast, but he waved it away, though it was awkward bringing up the other hand from the side of his chair. She smiled when he met her eyes. Two soldiers at the end of the hall argued as to who should read what part of a newspaper. ‘Life would be boring for me too,’ she said, ‘if there wasn’t so much work.’

The image of straw came to mind, a Home Counties corn dolly, except there was something refined in her features. She had worked in Cyprus with the camp organization for three years, and whatever the problems it was far better than being in dreary old England, with rationing and all that. Agreement came easy on such a score, and he found himself enjoying talk with a worldly woman of thirty. ‘You should be in an officers’ billet,’ she said, after he had mentioned his old school. ‘I spotted it straight away. And then your name, of course.’

The usual thing. Only the other week his platoon sergeant said: ‘You strike me as being a bit of a gentleman ranker, Strang. A perfect candidate for signing on and getting up the ladder a bit.’ The sergeant, a few years older, seemed so far ahead in age that acquaintance of a sort was possible, but not friendship. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ Herbert said.

But a woman of thirty was close enough to his own age, and their talk made him feel friendly towards her, like her, in fact, so that he kept any trace of the old Bert well hidden — not difficult these days. She must have felt something for him because otherwise why should she have sat at his table? ‘You’ve got a girlfriend, I suppose?’

‘Not me. People like me don’t have girlfriends.’

She drew back, a deliberate gesture meant to be amusing. ‘You’re not queer, are you?’

He laughed. ‘I don’t keep ’em long enough to have as a friend, is all I mean.’

‘Let’s see how we go, then,’ her fingers touching his wrist and then pulling away, an unmistakable signal.

Chitchat was what he wanted. He settled down to the luxury of benign thoughtlessness, a state of calm without worry, and let things take any direction she cared to go in.

She was like nothing on earth, or in his experience at any rate, a whirlwind who knew what she wanted and so made every move. For that reason the affair lasted little beyond the weeks of his leave, scorched itself out. Regret, surprise, the ditcher ditched, he assumed she had found somebody else. And why not? Yet there was a wound, and it ached, the only consolation being that he learned to separate the heart into compartments, as he had earlier surmised he would before having good reason for it. Like the bulkheads of a ship, if the flood of salty despair broke in, you could shut the watertight doors and keep the rest intact so as to prevent the whole bloody vessel going down into the dark. Life was too short not to write people off now and again, or be written off by them.

Nine

He stood at the door of a shed on the quayside while an RASC fatigue party loaded stores into the lorry. Time for a fag before seeing it back to the rendezvous in the mountains. ‘Have a drag, Ashley?’

‘Thanks. Looks like a troopship’s in.’

Among the pink-knees coming warily down the gangway Herbert spotted an awkward chubby figure, then the unmistakable gait and face of his old schoolmate Dominic. ‘There’s someone I don’t want to see.’

He dodged into hiding. Hallucination was the order of the day. But no, the sky was clear blue, the group illuminated, filing towards the next shed. Dominic stumbled under his kit. It was him all right.

‘Pay Corps wallahs,’ the driver said. ‘Our money’ll be fucked up for months.’

Another clandestine gaze through the slit of the door, and Dominic waited in line to board a gharry. His face had hardly altered from what seemed all those years ago, the last person Herbert wanted to see. Take a long time to get his knees brown. ‘Have they finished loading our gear yet?’

Another twenty minutes,’ Ashley told him.

The new Pay Corps arrivals sat in their lorry, silent and sweating. ‘Where do you suppose they’re going?’ Herbert asked. ‘Some cushy job at headquarters, I expect.’

Ashley put his paperback away. ‘Same road as us. I asked their driver. He’s browned off because he waited for them all morning.’

Dominic must be happy to be on such a ripping adventure, but Herbert thought that if he had to put up with his questions on all that had happened in his life since lighting off from school it would be positively sick-making, at the best tedious. Anyway it was no bloody business of his that he had spent most of the time working in a factory which he, Dominic, would consider a bit of a come down after all that stuff out of Caged Birds.

Stores loaded and roped on, Pemberton climbed into the cabin of the fifteen-hundredweight. ‘Get going,’ Herbert called. ‘We’ll go back through Omodhos.’

The driver unfolded his map. ‘Take a bit longer.’

‘Why not? I like that road.’

‘You’re the corporal.’

Carob trees flicked by, long brown beans gangling in the sun like withered turds. ‘Turd trees,’ the driver hee-hawed, gunning along the flat and not bothering to slow down, though he almost twitched a sleepy old donkey into a ditch.

Herbert wouldn’t bump into Dominic, no chance of it, and the Omodhos route attracted him in any case because on an exercise around the village, between urging his section to take cover, and getting on through the vineyards, he had seen a young woman hanging sheets on a line. She wasn’t long in his view, but the picture stayed with the clarity of the design on a postage stamp: a pallid oval face, black hair lengthening behind, dark brown eyes, and white headscarf. An arm reaching up to the clothesline elongated her bosom under a flowered blouse, though it was hard to be sure how much detail his lascivious imagination etched in later. ‘Did you see that woman?’ he asked Pemberton at the time.

He’d been half-asleep, as had most of the others. ‘What woman?’

‘In the vineyard, back there.’

‘You must have a touch of the sun.’

She saw him, and smiled. He settled into his outpost on the hillside for a few hours’ sleep by his well-oiled Bren, and dreamed about her. Heat in the rocks cooled after dusk, aromas of thyme and juniper drifting on the breeze. When on the march, incidents from the factory were his favourite recollection. Faces invaded space without warning, wanting to take over his soul, solidly and forever. He preferred to be colonized by an obsession with the woman than be a victim to anything from the past.

The sight of her made him wonder what he would do when he left the army, where to go, what caged bird refuge find. In a few months he would be on his way out, and the smile on the woman’s otherwise placid features turned away the thought of going back to Nottingham and immersing himself in the rattling machine music of the factory. Better to make his way around the world on a merchant ship, or try a job in London and know what it was like to be an ant among millions. The idea of having to make up his mind was anguish, and he even considered staying in the army for seven and five, though he preferred the heady uncertainty of not knowing what he was going to do till he did it.

At the warehouse a piece of grit had forked into his left boot, which helped the next few miles on the road to weary him even more, so that all he ached for was to see the woman and talk to her. Water still ran in the river, though it was June, and the road snaked between taller trees, their driver wrestling the wheel as if with a dragon whose head he had at last got down on the ground. Herbert envied him the combat, anything but sitting still and watching the all too familiar landscape go by, which only another sight of the woman could bring to life.

The pebble in his boot was easy to ignore the closer they got to the village. Brooding over the girl showed a sickness of the spirit, he was sure, a threat to himself he could do nothing about, a gun to the head. He didn’t want the vision to melt, though wondered whether Pemberton or the driver could detect the thickness of his obsession.

The undulating scrub of heather and olives, and then scattered tall trees whose shade flickered the windscreen, gave off a dry luxurious scent, fresher than at the coast, deepening his foolishness in love, at chasing a picture which had snared him on to a fateful road. Useless to choose it by hoping to avoid that idiot Dominic, the chances being they would meet in any case. He would have been a bigger fool to think it unlikely. Only the woman — though a cooler voice said such revelations never came twice. Even so, he must be driven through the village to prove it true or false.

If he saw her he would wave and get the lorry to stop, stroll between the trees and talk to her. She would smile again on seeing him. But how would he talk? His Greek was less than basic. He knew the alphabet from school but not much beyond a few travellers’ phrases, and how to count — a large percentage more than most but hardly fluent enough for courting. On the other hand maybe she was a schoolteacher who knew English, and had come back to be with her family for the weekend.

He would marshal up words and signs to charm her till she agreed to meet him a few days later. After a few occasions of stumbling communication in the vineyards, or by the house she lived in if he was lucky (perhaps he would meet her like Rebecca at the well) he would take her to the cinema, even though tall moustachioed brothers came as chaperones. Laughing at his gauche mistakes with the language she would teach him, till he could unravel affectionate thoughts for her wondrous approval. He was nineteen, and she maybe a few years beyond, but how could it matter? After a while they would get married in whatever church she named, buy a house for a few hundred pounds and, on his discharge from the army, he would land an easy job in administration so that they could live happily ever after.

Human intercourse would be difficult at first, on all sorts of levels, but exciting; she will have no preconceptions about my past, he thought; I’ll have no clear notion about hers; therefore we’ll have the romantic experience and even difficulty in getting to know each other, which may take years, but so much the better because it’ll be an adventure, since there’ll be more than a lot to learn.

Eyes ached at following the descent of one in ten. The road zigzagged up again, terraced vineyards to either side. He gobbed all that was dusty in his throat out of the window, as if to let the bus struggling behind tread down such pathetic ideas. Crumbling stone walls bordered the road, divided groves and terraces. When caged birds weren’t escaping, or preparing to, they were the victims of romantic dreams, he mused.

Milky cloud covered the descent into Omodhos. A building was marked with an Enosis sign. With such a big difference between ideas, language, race even, no woman would be seen with a British soldier, smile though he might, hope though he would, so he’d have to get used to the impossibility — unless she was Aphrodite or Circe or Oenone, for whom such trivial considerations wouldn’t matter. And yet, if they were made for each other, as he knew they must be, she would come to him in whatever manifestation because she had, after all, smiled at him. She could be married, but he wanted her with an excitement that wouldn’t leave him alone.

After the large monastery they drove through the packed houses of the village. Men stared from the café, and the lorry had to wait until an ancient geezer on a donkey turned into a side street. Women on stools in the doorways clicked sticks to make lace. Clear of buildings, there was no young woman for him to get down from the lorry and walk towards over the stony soil.

Chagrined, he looked at the village with the eyes of a soldier: the closely grouped houses on the bend would control the road if fortified both ways. Dispositions were noted on his map for artillery and crossfire, the siting of Brens and mortars, so that he momentarily forgot why he had made the driver bring them on this bleeding-heart roundabout track which Archie Bleasby (or even Dominic, had he come this way, or whenever he did) would say was a more than useless carry on.

He peered at every tree and wall, but the grove had been magicked away, no woman there. Or he couldn’t say where the ground had been. Terracing was at all angles, trees differently spaced. A blackbird flew across the windscreen. Beyond a house-to-house search, or a battue through outlying land, there was nothing to be done. She was gone, never to be found — as he had feared would be the case. A faint whistle of breath indicated marks for trying, and now it was back into himself, though with the certainty that the dream would haunt him forever.

Swivelling at a bend, the driver swore blind at what only he saw, spun from one side of the road to the other to avoid killing a woman who suddenly appeared carrying a load of wood. Such a hit would bring the population down from the village intent on stringing them up, and who could blame them? Carelessness was unforgivable. The problem was avoided, but Herbert knew they’d had it. Or the lorry had. Something was bound to happen, and he braced himself for the impact. Doors and bumpers hit a bridge, scraping masonry. Pemberton stayed silent and upright. They bounced back across the road.

All so slow. When was the loony driver going to bring it under control? Herbert called out as much, though didn’t know why. Inevitably the lorry jumped a culvert, slow it seemed, spun through pine trees. You could count them and the seconds it took for each to go by, if the heart let you.

Heads went down, and he sensed their progress in vivid colours, heard the grazing of sultry trunks, scraping and turning, the driver fighting with the strength and skill of a demon who wouldn’t be cornered. They landed precariously on a ledge lower down and, on thinking they were safe at last, the wheels slipped.

‘No!’ Pemberton shouted.

Herbert’s last hope, a crushing pain in his leg, was that they didn’t have enough petrol in the tank to catch fire — before the lorry went three more somersaults and smashed against rocks by the river.

He was sure he had been tied up and thrown on to a bed of pebbles. Some were sharper than others, though only when he tried to move. They were cooking him, and he couldn’t understand why. ‘What had he done to be treated thus? If you want to know he’d offended us.’ Bloody silly words streaming again and again through his brain.

He wasn’t even hot, or uncomfortable in his dream, but would be if he woke up. Would they eat him when they’d finished? Where they were he’d never know, too sleepy to care. One pebble grew to enormous size, and was sliced in two hemispheres, each shining grey as quartz as both parts wheeled off on separate trajectories into space. He hoped he hadn’t screamed, would be ashamed if he had. Every nightmare was only the same in that none lasted forever, though he swore the knives and forks had been real.

A clown face showed through clouds of disinfectant, recalling the Jewish hut in the refugee camp. Maybe he was sweating the stuff. He’d been knocked about. The bite of gangrene came and went.

‘You’ve got a Blighty one, corp. Half a dozen, really. The army won’t want you any more.’

Nor did he want to see that Beano face again, with its typical RAMC wide-lipped cackle, now that I know I’m not blind or deaf, he added to himself. As for the rest, maybe the MO would enlighten him — if he could get away from putting his hand up the nurses’ skirts. He vomited at the pain when he tried to turn to a better angle of comfort. The needle of the ward sister felt like the cut of a scalpel, and an enormous soft pillow muffled him back into oblivion.

‘We thought you was for the black pyjamas,’ the male orderly said, spooning slop into his mouth for supper. ‘Your driver only had a few bruises and a headache.’

‘Thank God for that.’ The croak came from inside his armour casing. He had never slept so many aeons. ‘How long have I been here?’

‘A week ago it happened. We laid bets when you was brought in.’

‘I hope you lost.’

‘Nar, I won five akkers. I just knew you was a hard case, though it was hard to read it on your face.’

All your life was said to pass before you in the moments before death, but it hadn’t with him because he had come out alive. The Technicolor flash-bang of the collision drummed around, and he wondered if he would ever get free of its endless tentacles of flesh and metal.

‘The shock’s wearing off,’ he was told.

His body was shaken to pieces, bombarded by stones, in a barrel corked and locked at both ends. Nightmare was more the name. He dreamed of being sawn in two across the waist, but the fatal separation didn’t happen. The two halves came closer in fact, and he awoke — though still in the dream — into a miracle of flying above mountain peaks that were swathed in snow. A jagged piece of dead wood ripped into his face again and again.

‘We had a little old woman from the town stitch your flesh together,’ the MO said. ‘A dab hand with a rusty needle she was. Still, we’ll have you out and about in a few months. You’ll never know it happened.’

He flew to another world, saw people, everyone he’d ever known but in no order, from all over the place, laughing or warning or commiserating. Hugh and Maud told him they were dead, not him, but he wasn’t to worry. Things would sort themselves out. What others said he couldn’t remember — drugged up to the eyeballs, he thought.

The major laughed when he came for a look, at the peepshow for the whole battalion. ‘You’ll live, Corporal, but I don’t know whether you’ll like it. Pity about the other chap. Things always happen to my best soldiers.’ A jovial, hard-hat, thinking what were a few wounds to a soldier? The trade had its ups and downs: ribs cracked, leg broken, one arm likewise, head bumped around enough to leave a permanent deep scar down one cheek. ‘What other chap, sir?’

‘They haven’t told you? Kind of them, I suppose. Pemberton. Brain-dead when they got him in. Nothing they could do. These bloody roads are a nightmare, though why you took the one through Omodhos I’ll never know. Just as much traffic as on the other. I’ve brought some fruit. We’ve told your next of kin there’s nothing to worry about.’

Sleep was peace. Those who die will be the lucky ones, he recalled from Treasure Island. Poor old Pemberton had jumped the gun, died the death. His folks will love him now he’s dead. No use worrying about that. He did, and the blackest gloom settled, because if he hadn’t chased that chimera Ashley might at worst only have been in the next bed, a leg equally angled.

They had both died, but he had been born again, or that’s what it seemed, all he could tell himself, out of action, in traction, and birds beyond the open windows whistling him into a summer mood, a cosy lull that let the days go by as if on casters, all worries of the past drained away in his weakness and sorrow and then, after God alone knew what process, blown back for him to put into their proper slot.

The ward maid had black hair pulled tightly back, and a comfortable bosom under her white apron, doing things for him no one should have to do for another, in a regime under which pride fragmented, but out of which manhood had to grow again, for what it would turn out to be worth. At least she wouldn’t be following him into civvy street to shout about the baby and booby he had been, which buoyed him up in darker moments.

He came out of his afternoon nap to see Archie sitting by the bed, and thought the accident was getting to his brain at last. Dominic would have been worse to dream about. It was Archie because the voice was real. ‘You look like an old man of forty. I walked past yer bed, till the sister pointed you out. What a bloody mess, though.’

‘What are you doing here?’ He wanted no one to witness his downfall, his helplessness, but regretted the harsh tone, and smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you.’

‘I asked for you at your camp, and they told me where yer was. Here’s some fags. Me and a gang came down from Blighty a fortnight ago. We’ve got to wire up on one o’ them new bases for National Servicemen. It was bleddy marvellous coming on the aeroplane. All in one day! I loved it. They even gen us a meal, and it worn’t the usual army slop. We’ll be finished though next month, and I’ll be sorry because I love it here in Cyprus. We get pissed every night. What ’appened, though?’

Herbert told what he could. ‘And my mate got killed.’

‘That’s a bleddy shame. Got his number on it, I suppose. Anyway, I hope you aren’t going to lay on yer back much longer, yer bone-idle bastard.’

Herbert laughed, the first time since when? — though the pain was no incentive, and he had been told to avoid it for the fear of splitting the stitches in his face. Nor was it easy to talk. ‘I won’t be here a minute longer than I’ve got to.’

‘Ar, I know yer won’t. Yer’d better not. Yer was lucky, though, coming out of that. I’ll tek yer for a pint of the local spew when you’re out, to celebrate.’

Which, Herbert thought, would be one in the eye for the woman of Omodhos. ‘I’ll keep you to it.’

Archie leaned close. ‘I met a bint the other night in town. Lovely she is, black hair and dark eyes, and very nice tits. Trying to teach me the lingo. I was doing all right, as well. I told ’er I’d come back and marry her when I got demobbed.’

‘What an awful lie.’

‘Me? A liar? Not me, our Bert. I shan’t marry her, though. She’s too nice for that. I’ll do her a favour. She deserves a lot better than me.’ He stood. ‘But I’ve got to ’op it. The blokes can only cover up for me a couple of hours. I’ll see you in a few days, if you aren’t out by then.’

‘I might be. I’m already hobbling to the lavatory.’

The MO said he would need a few weeks yet, but he willed himself to mend, to become viable by his own effort, walking up and down the ward all day and every day, and wandering the grounds in his hospital blue like a bent old man. A glance of his figure in a shining window forced him to straighten, and go at a faster rate. He drew the pieces of his body bit by bit together. In the evening he sat by his bed, aloof, unwilling to talk to the man next door who was writing poems which read like the worst of Patience Strong. Herbert read one out of politeness, and said it was good, and that he should persevere, which made the man happy. Herbert did all that his brain allowed him to, which was pull the copy of Caged Birds out of his small pack and comfort himself with the same old story.

Shaken from sleep at five in the morning of a day before Archie could call on him again, he was told that a signal ordered him home. ‘Blighty, that’s what, lucky swine. I’ll give you a hand with your clobber.’

An ambulance screamed all the way to Akrotiri, a fine fresh day beginning, though Herbert within his deadness knew he was glad to leave. Helped up steps into a capacious York transport plane the smell of pear drops, furniture polish and petrol had a touch of civilization about it. Four engines roared at the end of the runway, and soon the nearest silver wing floated by the mountains. His face burned at the memory of his passion for the unknown woman of Omodhos, who had killed Pemberton in mistake for him, the goddess-madonna who seemed to be shadowing him even as a coastline was left behind which he hoped never to see again.

A few bumps before getting to twenty thousand feet caused an RAF bloke behind to use his sickbag. Herbert supposed they were far over the sea when weird snowy continents of cloud spread below, an antarctica of topographical complexity looking cool to walk upon — with the nightmare sensation of falling through and down to annihilation on the earth. Wanting to tell Pemberton (he couldn’t for some reason think of him as Ashley any more) to put his bloody book away and look at such marvellous and fantastic scenery, the pang struck that he no longer existed — except in memory. Immortality was a confidence trick of the church, because you only lived as long as anyone alive could remember you. But Ashley, an unexplainable image, was close because Herbert still lived. Maybe I’ll write to his folks and tell them what a good chap he was, either to twist the knife, or make them grateful.

He pulled a copy of Everybody’s from under the seat, and in an hour had done the puzzles and read every crass piece. The pilot announced they were overflying Crete, of which only a few ashy peaks showed through a gap in the weather. The meal finished, he leaned his head back, senses culled away by the noise of the engines.

A medical orderly going home on leave had been seconded to watch over and generally help him, but his head close to a Paul Renin book kept him silent most of the way, for which Herbert was thankful. Being talked to or at would be like having a bandage continually put on and torn off. Every wound was a low-grade ache, more than enough to make the temper surly. To be sealed into himself was the only possibility of ease; no longer interested in the cloud scenery. Nothing would fasten his senses into concentration, he was embroiled within, unanchored, disembodied, couldn’t even envy those with the whisky flask in a better sort of class nearer the crew’s quarters.

Malta, George Cross Island, part of the real world, recalling the thrill of its last-ditch tribulations heard about on the wireless at school, far back in history it seemed. The place looked arid, till they went grandly over the harbour, and he could peer down at greenery between the walls as the huge plane turned for the airfield.

With half a dozen others he shared a hut at Passenger and Freight Services, night-stopping before the last leg to Blighty. A meal of soup, pork chops and tinned pineapple was too much for him to finish, and he went to his bed more worn out than if he had been crawling over the hills of Cyprus for a week, knowing nothing till the orderly shook him to get dressed because it was morning.

The coast of Sicily came in sight. Two more hours and he saw the north-east shoulder of Sardinia, then Corsica. Cutting the shoreline into France, cloud assembled, and nothing was visible except murk when over the Alps. A Penguin Life of Shelley called Ariel kept him going until, without any reason looking from the window, he marvelled for the first time since leaving Cyprus at being eighteen thousand feet above the earth, and at the four Rolls Royce Merlins with their sturdy but invisible propellers made in Derby speeding them along at two hundred miles an hour. Bundled into the plane from the hospital, he had felt only numbness, but now he opened his map to surmise their route, as if an inner light was bringing him back to life.

Lyons, Orleans and, after five hours from taking off, the orderly elbowed him to say they were over the English Channel. Herbert woke to changing pressure as the aircraft decreased height, and saw the coast by Portsmouth. The orderly’s head was between him and the window, as if he had never been to England before. Sheep spotted the pale green spurs of the Downs while making their run in. To turn his neck was painful, but worth the wrench. ‘You’re not supposed to do that,’ the orderly said.

A mouthful of the foulest language came easy to his lips, which caused him to smile at realizing that the factory was again close enough for him to use it, though he checked himself, saying merely: ‘Well, I’ve already done it, shag, haven’t I?’

Down to earth, the therapy of recovery went on for more weeks than he cared to endure, until all limbs were in good trim and the MO said he was as fit as when he enlisted. He could be demobbed and returned to civvy street while still twenty. His parents wanted him to come and see them but he considered himself old enough not to bother, wouldn’t call until mood or circumstances allowed him to without endless worrying about the decision. For the present he had firm control over both, though on one of his trips into town he posted a letter saying he would come as soon as was convenient.

A real man should have no parents, he thought on his way back from posting the letter, taking his way through summer woods on a back route to the hospital. You can’t begin to feel a man till you have broken from them in body and spirit. A man with parents, who cannot for that reason act as he would wish, is in no way a man, that is to say independent. And yet he didn’t feel at all bonded to them, so what was he going on about? Unless by thinking this way he wanted to be influenced by them, obliged to them — which he couldn’t imagine to be so at all.

The further you got from their petrifying orbit of control the freer you were, was all he knew, and the freer you were the more were you at the behest of the unexpected, which force of change or fate provided the only possibility of living your own unique life, of having your life altered in unexpected ways, and of eventually advancing into a sphere so exalted that you could look down and wonder at the petty lives your parents had led, and realize how insignificant your life would have been if you hadn’t fought free of them.

Finally he could only say aloud, as he paused while wading through swathes of tall bayrose willow herb blocking part of the path: ‘Nah, I just don’t want to be bothered with them,’ not unhappy that he had reasoned the matter through only after going to the pillar box and not before, and knowing that working in a factory would be just about as far from them as he could get.