The Grandmothers

The holds were stocked with the food of wartime England, worse than they had been eating in camp. Supper was bread and a stew, mostly potatoes. Already the strong tea was slopping about in their mugs, which were sliding despite the little ledges designed to keep them from sliding. Not one of these men had ever suffered seasickness, and now they wondered if they had caught something, and Johnnie Payne said he wanted to get his head down. ‘You’re queasy,’ said Corporal Clark, who wasn’t feeling too good himself. ‘Better sling your hammocks.’ Jokes and jollying traditionally accompany the first time anyone slings a hammock, but the ship was beginning to swing. The lavatories, they already knew, were insufficient: queues were forming. Corporal Clark, who had never known defiance from his men, now, having told them to get into their hammocks, saw them bolting up to the deck, to lean over the rail. Since they were there, he joined them. All along the railings were men being sick.

Up here with the wind on them they felt better, but they were staring out into the dark unknown. They could hear the waves hissing but see nothing. They knew how much danger they were in. This was not a convoy, which has to travel at the pace of the slowest vessel. Troopships, full of precious soldiers, enormous, must dominate the convoy, presenting themselves as targets. This ship was travelling with two destroyers to guard it from U-boats, but it was a long way to Cape Town, and they must stop at Freetown to refuel and restock, and submarines haunted both ports, and roamed about the Atlantic. Ships had been sunk recently. All this they knew. No one had told them, no one could have told them, yet they all knew.

And to stand here at the dark rail, on a dark deck, looking into blackness - no, better downstairs, better below deck, and up and down the tiers of that enormous edifice men were making that decision: below deck was the illusion of safety, with the walls of the ship around them.

So they were thinking, that first night.

To sleep in a hammock takes practice. It was not a comfortable night. On the table where they would have their meals stood basins where, having tumbled out of their hammocks again, some were being sick; they scrambled back into hammocks, falling, cursing, bruising themselves.

The morning was grey and cold; they were in the Bay of Biscay. Corporal Clark, fussy with worry and indecision, and because he-was feeling sick, told them to have breakfast. He did not know if this was the right thing: the sergeants were on the deck above, with some of the lieutenants, and he knew, having gone up to see, that many were m their bunks.

James and the farmer’s son ate some porridge and wished they hadn’t.

Orders came for attendance on deck, for inspection, but Corporal Clark went up again to the sergeants. Most were ill, but Sergeant Perkins, feeling fine, came down, and saw that the men were not up to it.

The Bay of Biscay was doing its worst. From top to bottom of the great ship, the men were ill, and the smell anywhere below decks, or in the cabins, was foul.

In their hammocks the constant swaying, so bad that the hammock of one man knocking another could set off the five in that row, was unendurable. Out of their hammocks, trying to sit at the table, there was no relief. Up on deck, surrounded by a grey tumult of water, was as bad. By the evening of the second day it was evident this was a ship of the sick, except for a minority who were apparently immune, and who volunteered for mess duty, where they could eat as much as they liked, hut were ordered for cleaning duty, which meant swabbing fouled cabins and fouler decks.

Below the layer where B Platoon was, which they had felt must be the ultimate hell-hole, was a deeper layer of crammed humanity. When the ship had been fitted to take troops, attempts had been made at ventilating these depths, but in those commodious spaces, which had once housed the luggage of the rich, or foodstuffs designed for peacetime menus, the air was bad, and everyone was sick down there. On the third night, men on E Deck heard screaming from below them: this was how they became aware they were not the lowest depths of suffering. Claustrophobia, they knew at once; for they themselves were in danger of breaking and screaming. It was not only the press of the ship’s walls about them, but knowing how the great dark outside went on to a horizon they knew must be there, but could not see: no moon, no stars, thick cloud, dark above and dark below.

On the fourth night, ignoring the corporal, who followed them, not even expostulating, they were on deck, where at least the air blew cold. They lay along the walls of a deck, keeping their eyes shut, and endured. Rupert Fitch, the farmer’s son, was better off than most. He sat with his back against a wall, his head on his knees, and hummed dance tunes and hymns. The great ship ploughed on into the dark, with a deep steady swaying motion. In the morning nothing had changed, but the deck was crowded with men, some from the lower depths. Corporal Clark, the shepherd of B Platoon, was lying like them, rolling a little as the ship did, face down, head on his arms.

There came tripping down the companionway Sergeant ‘Ginger’ Perkins, a short compact-bodied man, with bristly carroty hair, and a belligerent stance cultivated for his role. He might have intended to impose order on a shocking scene, but while he did not suffer himself, he had spent days now surrounded by the suffering. His nature was such that his impulse had to he a bellow of ‘Pull yourselves together!’ but he was silent. Some of the men were in pools of vomit, and diarrhoea had made its appearance.

‘Corporal Clark!’ he shouted, and the corporal tried to sit up, but the change of position made him retch. This sergeant was famed for his strictness. ‘Hard but just’, was what he aimed at, but the formula did not apply today. He went down into B Platoon’s sleeping quarters - the nearest. Crockery from the cupboard was lying smashed in the vomit on the floor. The smell was horrible. He stood hesitating: his responsibilities were on E Deck, were here; he had no charges in the ship’s depths. But up on D Deck, where the sergeants had their being, reports had arrived about what was going on in the ship’s dark bowels. The corporals, those who were still functioning, had come up to say something should be done. Sergeant Perkins decided to take a look for himself. Down several ladders he tripped, and stood in a large space, so dimly lit he couldn’t see the further walls, and heard moans coming from some hammocks, though most were empty: the sufferers had taken themselves up to D Deck. Against orders! Against anything permissible! This was pure anarchy, and he felt licensed to make a decision. He himself would go up to C Deck and tell any officer on his feet and responsible that if anarchy was to end, then orders should go forth that the wretches still down there in that stinking dark must go up into the air.

Sergeant Perkins returned to E Deck and his level of duty: a hundred men, but who could say which of these poor wretches lying everywhere on deck, most face down, heads in their arms, were his? He turned his back on the scene and stood at the rails, and regarded the heaving grey sea. Sergeant Perkins had paddled in rock pools as a child, taken a crab in his pail to the boarding house, been told by his father to go and put it back. That had been his sea. As a child he had not taken in the desolation of the ocean’s vastness, not seen much more than a pool in rocks, a beach where waves ran in over his feet while he jumped and screamed with laughter. Now he looked out, hardly seeing where the sea ended and the sky began, and he thought of the submarines somewhere down there, and he was afraid. A peacetime sergeant, he had not before this voyage had occasion to feel fear.

He turned, slowly, giving thanks for sound stomach muscles -under strain, today - and announced to anyone capable of listening that the weather would improve. He had heard that it would from an officer descending to D Deck from C Deck. ‘It can’t go on like this,’ he mused, in his private voice, which was an all-purpose cockney, modified or strengthened according to the person he was speaking to. In his sergeant’s voice he said, ‘Corporal, when you’re feeling better, report to me.’ No reply. Along the deck one of the bodies in a knot of them - A Platoon, he believed - was moaning, ‘God, God, God.’

‘God is about it,’ thought Sergeant Perkins, smartly ascending the ladder to D Deck, and then up again to C Deck where, having asked permission to speak, he said that what was going on in the bottom of the ship was a crying shame. ‘We’d be prosecuted if we kept animals in those conditions, sir.’

When badly seasick, as most of us may remember, death seems preferable to even another ten minutes of this misery - death even by U-boat, some of these men might have agreed. And then, just as Sergeant Perkins had promised, the sea was calm, and men were slowly coming to themselves, sitting up, trying to stand, staggering to the rails and seeing the sea properly, possibly for the first time since they embarked. It was now a quiet grey-silk sea, flecked occasionally with white, and under a blue sky frilled with white cloud.

Corporal Clark sat up. Sergeant Perkins appeared; a squad detailed to restore order was hosing down the decks, and if soldiers’ legs were in the way, that was too bad.

Water was certainly what they needed. They and their uniforms were filthy. Off with their clothes, and lines of naked men moved up to where they were issued with soap that would lather in sea water, were told to put on their hot weather uniforms, and deposit their dirty ones in a heap to be washed. Soon piles, each many yards high, rose on the deck, and another squad was bearing them off, to be washed.

On every deck lines of barbers - which is what they had been in civvy street - stood behind chairs where the men came to be shaved and have their hair trimmed.

On decks newly scrubbed men who a few hours ago could hardly sit up, were put through their drills by sergeants who, most of them, had been as sick. Well, almost: their ventilation was better. Then, back to their quarters which had been hosed, swabbed, and now smelled of soap. There was food. Tender stomachs sulked at the hunks of bread, margarine-smeared, the stew, the rice pudding. James ate a little; the farmer’s son more; no one did well. They were all tired.

Up on the higher decks similar ablutions and tidyings went on. The highest deck had a swimming pool, and there the officers - so they knew, Sergeant Perkins had told them - in relays of twenty were in the water - salt - and then out at once to let in the next twenty.

The Captain and the senior officers went to bed every night fully dressed, with their boots ready beside them.

The sergeants and some lieutenants were m cabins designed for two but fitted for eight, four bunks on each side.

Some senior officers were four or six in cabins meant for two. But of course the cabins up there were bigger.

‘And before you say it I’ll say it for you,’ said Sergeant Perkins.

‘Life’s a bugger. Hut no one on this ship is on a luxury cruise. Right? Right. Now, form fours.’

Well out of the Bay of Biscay, they were on their way to Freetown, that ancient si ave-trading port, now prospering out of the ships that went to refuel, restock. But Rupert Fitch told James they were not heading south, but west. ‘Look at the sun.’ Other farmers’ boys were telling town boys ‘Look at the sun.’ This spread unease throughout the ship. Were they not going to Cape Town, then? Or Freetown?

And then, it was hot. Men who had known only English summers, with their rare really hot days, were sweating and ill with heat. Not enough shade on E Deck for the hundreds of men, lying, sitting, or even standing, and there were already cases of sunstroke. Sergeant ‘Ginger’ Perkins, with his fair skin, was scarlet when he addressed them, his neck and arms mottled with heat rash, ‘Too hot to drill, lads. Just take it easy. And don’t get carried away with your water ration - it’s running short.’

Fresh water, short; but all that sea water lapping and rippling down there. A few men, ignorant, tempted, let down their mess tins and brought up sea water, and while admonished by Corporal Clark, drank. They were sick. The staterooms set aside for sick rooms were filling. It was known that some of the officers on the second level of the ship, U Deck, had had to double up again.

When the men changed their uniforms for those washed in sea water, they found that their sweat, enhanced by the salt in the cloth, stung, and the stuff of their shorts and shirts chafed them.

The ship was still going west, Rupert Fitch stood at the rail. He watched how the sun moved, as he had done all his life, how its path on the glittering sea changed, and said that now they were headed south-west.

It was too hot to eat. They wanted only to drink, but a second warning came from above, about using restraint until they reached port.

‘Cheer up, lads,’ said Sergeant Perkins. ‘There’ll be water a-plenty in Freetown. And fruit. There’ll be fruit. We could do with a bit of that, we’ll be eating like kings. What do you say?’

They were saying very little.

Awnings were fitted up all along E Deck and there was a thin hot shade, where men with sun-reddened skins sat or lay dreaming of water gushing from taps, of pools, ponds, streams, rivers; looking, when the dazzle allowed, with eyes used to gentler light, on to the ocean that was calm and seemed to oil and slide, beaten flat by the sun. Shoals of porpoises and dolphins could have entertained them were they not so hot and thinking of U-boats. Flying fishes leaped, and hit the sides of the ship and slid back down into the sea, dead or not, or a high-flier assisted by a breeze landed on the deck among the men, who threw it back.

Harold Murray, the cut-price clothes salesman, rose from the deck, and stalked unsteadily to the ladder going up. He climbed, while Corporal Clark, shouting at him, clambered after bun; then another ladder, while the stout man (not quite so stout now) puffed and strained to keep up. Harold Murray reached B Deck, where he saluted a surprised Commander Birch, and said politely. ‘l’m fed up, I am. I’ve ‘ad it up to ‘ere. I’m going ‘ome’ He was taken to join the madmen.

Every day the men lined up for their salt-water douches, which now fell stinging on reddened skins, some of which were breaking into blisters. Newly shaved faces burned.

The heavy food, bowls of stew, reconstituted soup, scrambled eggs from dried egg powder, the milk puddings, was hardly touched, at mealtime after mealtime.

James sat with his back to the wall of the ship, Rupert Fitch beside him, looked at the sea and believed that each porpoise or dolphin was a U-boat. Every man on the ship well enough stared at the sea and saw U-boats. In those days, submarines had to come up into the air: now they may circle the globe with their load of weapons and never surface. Then … ‘Look,’ a man would shout, ‘look there - a periscope, sir. “No, that’s a fish.’ Fish there were, the ship was moving through a sea of fish. The ship spewed out its rubbish and the unconsumed food, and the waters behind rioted with competing fish of all sizes, while above seabirds screamed and squawked and mewed, diving to snatch booty from the leaping and mouthing fish. A spectacle. All the decks at the stern were crowded with men well enough to enjoy it, mostly the ship’s officers, whose apparent immunity to the sufferings by sun and sea was to the men an affront.

The destroyers that were protecting them seemed to be everywhere, in a different position every time they looked, in front, behind, alongside, their guns slanting down, their searchlights ready to switch on if a submarine were spotted. On their own ship there were guns on the top deck, and anti-submarine guns and waiting searchlights.

Rupert Fitch said they were going east now; they were back on course for Freetown. And for danger, for subs lurked at the entrances to Freetown harbour. James sat with his eyes closed, imagining how the U-boats were moving about down there. He was thinking, If they get us now, if we sink, if I die, then I’ll not have found my girl, the one meant for me. I’ll never have known real love. He remembered the farmer’s daughter in Northumberland and tried to persuade himself that had been love, and that she was dreaming of him. But, if the U-boat got them, it was love that would be extinguished. I lis love. ‘Do you have a girl?’ he asked Rupert Fitch, who replied, yes, he was engaged to marry, and showed photographs of his girl: he knew she would wait for him.

Then, at last, the ship that was blistering with heat, its camouflage paint fading, was sliding towards Freetown, and every soul on board listened for the thud of a torpedo. But they made it, they got safely in. The soldiers were not granted shore leave but they watched batches of officers going ashore, and then containers of food, and above all, of water, coming aboard, borne by bare-footed blacks in clothes not far off rags. Water. Inexhaustible water from the taps and in barrels standing on the deck. They drank, could not stop drinking, and some, trying not to be seen, poured this fresh water over their heads, or their sore and blistering bodies, and, particularly, hot and inflamed crotches that did not like sea water at all. Two days in Freetown. The food was at once lighter, better, with chicken and fish; and fruit arrived with every meal. They ate this fruit they had not heard of, many of them, let alone seen, as if they had been craving pawpaws and pineapples and melons and plantains, and not pears and apples. Some bad stomachs resulted.

And now they would run the gauntlet again: they were leaving Freetown and would be on their last leg, the thousands of miles still to go, to Cape Town.

The former Bristol Castle, in her coat of blights and blotches, slid out with a destroyer in front and one behind. Now the soldiers could see the crowds of white-clad men - ‘They’re navy types, they’re used to it,’- on the decks under the guns. Salutes back and forth, and melancholy hoots of greeting. Then the destroyers were on either side. Not to anyone’s surprise, the ship was going west again. This was to fool the U-boats who would expect them on a southerly route. ‘But,’ said the soldiers, ‘wouldn’t they expect a double bluff - us going south?’ ‘There are probably U-boats in both sea lanes.’ If you could call this tossing and tumbling grey-blue waste of water that was empty in front of them, all the way to South America, with rapidly-retreating Africa at their backs, something able to accommodate even the idea of sea ways, sea paths, sea lanes, routes.

So they jested, these soldiers, up and down the ship, in their many voices and accents, staring out, ready to spot a periscope, the emerging dark shape of a U-boat, the dark running shape of a torpedo coming towards them. They joked because the plenitudes and safety of Freetown were still in them, but it was hot, it was so very hot, and soon they were in the same state as before, filling the decks that were sun-lanced under awnings that went up everywhere, reed matting taken aboard at Freetown. And then it was night, their saviour. Through the long angry hot hours they thought of the night to come, moonlit or dark, it was the same to them, just the beneficent cool of it. Or rather, cooler, not the chill they longed for, but at least not the misery of the day. They still went west. The soldiers felt better going south, their proper direction, faster, they would get there sooner. Heading west it was into the unknown, to Rio de Janeiro, was it? Buenos Aires? They tried to joke, but then joking was over, because the sea rose up again, not heaving and rolling but rearing in explosions of foam, battering the ship’s sides. At once Rupert Fitch succumbed. His fair skin, well flecked with freckles, disappeared under blisters, and his temperature shot up. He was escorted up to the doctors. James was left lonely, as well as sick and hot. ‘That’s it, I won’t see him again, I suppose.’

No soldiers were left in hell-holds now. They were on deck. The sergeants, those who could stand. Sergeant Perkins among them, had made their way to the top of the ship, found their officers, made urgent requests. A couple of officers came down, saw the deck so crammed with hundreds of men that it was not possible to step between them; the order went forth that a suitable number - it would have to be hundreds, to make the difference - would go up to the deck above, which housed the sergeants and some junior officers. James was one who moved up, with his platoon. There they saw the sergeants’ cramped conditions, eight in the space for two, but they had bunks, at least they could He on something hard that wasn’t the deck: they didn’t have to fight with hammocks, and they had open portholes.

To preserve proper order, and niceties of the hierarchy, the starboard side was for the sergeants and young office re, port was for Other Ranks. In the mornings port got the sun, in the afternoons, starboard. Not that it made such difference. Still they sailed west, the destroyers moving around them, but hardly visible now because of the waves. And then there was a storm. The soldiers were informed this was a storm, but they could not have said there was a difference between the pounding roughness of before and now. Sergeant Perkins came down to tell them, ‘Cheer up, a ship this size has never been sunk by the weather.’ So that left U-boats.

Hundreds of men lay on the decks, burning up with heat, and heaved, and retched, needing to be sick, but they were not eating. In the mornings they were ordered to their feet, and crowded to the rails, holding on to them and to each other, while a unit of the lucky ones who were not sick hosed down the decks, and they shrank back from the stinging sea water. And at once they lay down or, rather, collapsed.

Water was short again. From this they deduced that it had not been planned that they should take such a long detour west. And that meant they were taking a detour to avoid something. So they were being dogged by a U-boat or by more than one. They were thirsty. Oddly, though it was so hot, some shivered, while they burned: heat stroke, and up they went to the sickbays.

To endure the unendurable, what that needs is to cling to time, which must pass: another hour, another, another, no I can’t, no I won’t, I simply cannot bear it, no one could, the pounding knocking headache, as if a load of dirty water were loose in your skull, the nausea, the aching bones, the stinging skin. Some men bled from raw skins and bursting blisters - up they went. Squads appeared twice a day, to locate the worst sufferers, but the ship was swinging so that they could hardly keep on their feet, but staggered among the men cramming the decks, or held to a rail, trying to see from there who was bad. Bruises and blisters were easy to see, but there were broken bones.

Day after day; night after night. And then they noticed - someone did, and the word went around - that they were going south-east. Long ago - so it seemed - the misery had been absorbed into the hopelessness of the long suffering. Why should this end? If it has gone on as long as this, then it may go on for ever. Going east, were they? Then what was to stop the boat turning again to go west? No, they didn’t trust good news.

It was becoming noticeable that the sun did not strike down so hard and direct. It was not so hot. The storm was past, so they were told, but they still swung and rolled. And then, while they could hardly stand, they were ordered on to their feet. Drilling was out of the question, but they were going to present themselves in Cape Town at least shaved and in clean clothes. The barbers again sat in rows on the lower decks, deep cans of fresh water sloshing between their knees, and they shaved whoever came forward. Some refused: their faces were too raw. There was no man who did not wince as the steel touched burned skin.

The order was that the rationing of fresh water for drinking was over. Clearly, a longer time of dodging about the Atlantic had been envisaged, and the water had been saved for that. Nothing that these men had heard for weeks heartened them more than the ending of water rationing. Yet, only for drinking, mind you, there was not enough for washing themselves, let alone their clothes.

They must put on their clean, salt-water-washed uniforms, and all other clothing must be piled again to be washed in Cape Town. Again the heaps of dirty, sweaty, sick-soaked, urine-soaked uniforms mounted high.

The order came that now the sea was calm - was it? Really! Was this what they called calm! - to eat what they could of a light supper. Fresh eggs taken on at Freetown had mostly succumbed to the storm, but there was chicken and bread, which they tried to eat.

That last night on board, except for those in the sickbays, except for the poor madmen who were being kept doped in what was once the Second Class Writing Room, everyone was on deck, watching for the first sight of land, blessed land, as sailors and sea travellers have done for centuries after a bad voyage, longing for the fair Cape of Good Hope.

It was dangerous, all knew, approaching port, for where else would U-boats be lurking if not here? The two destroyers were everywhere, behind, in front, taking off apparently at random, and back again, and then it was light, and the seas around them were tumbling and running but not heaving up into the monstrous mountains that had seemed ready to engulf the ship. They were ordered to eat breakfast. ‘Get to it, lads,’ ordered Sergeant Perkins who remained solid flesh, unlike his thin and haggard charges. Tea and bread and jam was not what shrunken stomachs wanted.

Back on deck, they saw that a low line of cloud on the horizon marked land: that was Table Mountain they were seeing. So it really was over … no, not yet, the rumour went around that a U-boat was known to be in the area.

Sergeant Perkins stood in front of his hundred men with their corporals, and said to them, ‘Right, lads. It’s over. Time and the hour rims through the roughest day. Yes. Nothing was ever better said than that, eh, lads?’

Of the men there looking at him perhaps two or three knew how to attribute the quotation, but every face showed how the words described what they had been through. As for Sergeant Perkins, he had seen them on a calendar, long ago, and they had so perfectly said what he needed at a bad time in an unsafe adolescence that he had used the philosophy offered to him, and indeed, on many occasions since.

Now, as they watched, he reflated himself with the stuff of command and shouted, ‘Right, that’s it. Playtime over. No more fun and games. Private Payne, your belt’s askew. God, what a load of shirkers. Attention. Now, take your turn behind A Platoon for disembarkation.’

Two young women reclined on deckchairs on a verandah high on a slope of Table Mountain where they could overlook that part of the sea where the troopship would arrive, today or tomorrow. They were positioned so that the pillars of the stoep did not obstruct their view: ships when they appeared could be mistaken for a mote in the eye, a whale, even a seabird. They knew the troopship was coming because their husbands, both at the base in Simonstown, had told them. They had not been told the name of the ship or its destination. They had not passed on the enticing information. But surely the maids and the men who looked after their gardens would have noticed food arriving, not to mention the wine and the beer?

Both women were hostesses, known for their parties and their largesse. This would not be their first troopship, nor, it ‘was certain, the last. Cape Town, for the period the troops were on leave while the ship was refuelled and restocked with food and clean water, was not itself, was transformed into a city of soldiery in search of food, drink, and girls. Of course black or brown flesh was out of bounds, but this is not to say that the rules were kept.

The women, Daphne Wright and Betty Stubbs, had plans for festive days, at the very least two, with luck four or even five.

Under a tree in the garden the Coloured nanny sat with a pretty child of about eighteen months, who began to grizzle. ‘Okay, bring her to me,’ called Betty, and the nanny, a big brown girl in a pink dress and a white apron, came to deposit the child on her mother’s body, where she lay sprawled, and at once fell asleep. The nanny returned to her place under the tree, where she could watch for when she would next he needed. She began to knit.

Daphne watched the scene from under the hand that shielded her eyes from the glare, and said, ‘I’m getting as broody as hell, Bets.’ She stroked her flat stomach. She was wearing a scarlet skirt and white shirt and with her yellow hair looked like a girl on an advertising poster for a happy holiday.

“Hell, give me a break, eighteen months is too soon. We’ll start together and keep each other company.’

‘Joe doesn’t want us to start until after the war.’

‘That could be years.’

‘He says he doesn’t want me to he a widow with a kid. I say I’d like something to remember him by.’

Both husbands went off on hush-hush trips to various bits of Africa, and the wives suffered till they got back.

‘Bertie told me that Henry …’ - her husband - ‘had to make a forced landing in the bush last month. They nearly pranged. It was a close thing,’ remarked Betty.

‘Henry didn’t tell you?’ Daphne knew, because her husband had told her, hut not knowing if Betty had been told, was careful not to mention it.

‘No, he didn’t. I always say it’s a lot worse, when he doesn’t tell me.’

‘There’s a lot they don’t tell us.’

Betty was stroking her little child’s soft back, exposed by a scrap of white shirt, and Daphne said again, ‘But I am broody, I’m broody as hell. I think I’ll get pregnant and then he’ll have to like it.’

‘Of course he’ll like it.’

They resumed their watch on the innocent-seeming sea, where submarines might he lurking at that moment. No sign of the troopship, not a ship in sight, only the blue plains of the sea.

‘If it’s three nights, we’ll be broke for months,’ said Betty.

‘And if there’s a fourth we’ll urn out of food and everything.’

‘We can drive out and see what we can get from the farms.’

‘And the petrol?’

‘I’ve got a little stashed away.’

This exchange, on a comfortable grumbling note, had sent Betty to sleep. She lay, her infant on top of her, her long brown arms, long brown legs, extended, her dark hair loose across her face.

Daphne raised herself on an elbow and looked at the charming scene. Tears were not far off. She did want a baby. She had lost one in a miscarriage and now greeted the regular appearance of her monthlies with a feeling that she was a failure: yet they took precautions, or, rather, Joe did: yet they both wanted a baby.

She thought that Betty was the only person among a pretty large circle of acquaintances she could ‘really’ talk to. They knew everything about each other. This happy state of affairs had begun from the moment she, Daphne, had arrived in Cape Town to marry Joe.

Daphne had been an English girl, in an English country town, when handsome Joe Wright arrived to visit a school friend. He was on leave from Simonstown in South Africa. It was I937. They had danced all night at the Summer Ball, and he had swept her off her feet. ‘He swept you off your feet.’ Well, he had. ‘Marry me,’ he said, or commanded, and she followed him on the next Union Castle ship to Cape Town. The Stirling Castle. (Perhaps the same ship that they were expecting now.) There was a fancy wedding. Joe was one of an old Cape family. Daphne, with her narrow experience, could have been overwhelmed, but she was not. The girl who arrived in Cape Town was not the Daphne who had embarked. On board were a group of South African girls returning from good times and trips around Europe. At first she had been shocked, and then envious. They were different in style from English girls, free and easy, loud, assertive, and wearing clothes she had at first thought showy. She had overheard one say to another, about herself, ‘She’s English, you know, baby-blue English. Little Miss Muffet.’

Daphne, a blonde, with blue eyes and a pearly complexion, did wear baby blue a lot. ‘It is your colour.’ She wore charming dresses in crępe de chine with lace collars and little buttons down the front; she wore hats and little white gloves. ‘A lady is known by her gloves.’ Now she knew herself to be insipid and timid.

No sooner had she arrived in Cape Town, than she jettisoned her trousseau and wore strong colours, and her pale gold hair with its little puffs and tendrils became a heavy yellow chignon; her voice loudened and she lost the shy soft ways she had been taught. She bloomed into a Cape Town hostess, gave parties that were written up in the gossip columns and was generally a credit to her husband.

And what did he think about all this? He had fallen for her because of those qualities she had discarded. A refreshing change from the South African girls, he had said, playing with those girlish pale gold wisps, con in lending her English skin and her rosebud mouth which she now kept slashed with red lipstick. In fact she out-did the South African girls who had despised her; she was more daring than they. Joe protested once or twice during the transformation, ‘Come on Dafil Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?’Did he mourn that timid girl-bride? But they were good pals, that’s what he told her and everyone. How could he not be proud of her, overtopping the wives of his fellow officers, for dash, style; and, too, she was funny and brave in everything.

Betty, the South African wife of Captain Henry Stubbs, lived in a house similar to this one, next door, was the same age, twenty-four; the two husbands were the same rank: they were Simonstown wives. That they should have ‘known’ each other had been inevitable, but they became friends. Real friends. Only friends. Best friends.

Daphne lay propped on her elbow watching that friend of hers, lovely Betty Stubbs, lost to the world with her infant spread on top of her, both mysterious in sleep, and she thought, feeling cold and frightened, that she had her good pal Joe and her good pal Betty beside her in this alarming continent, but apart from them she was alone, without them she would be adrift. Alone, far from home and with a war on. ‘Don’t forget, there’s a war on.’ Funny how people liked saying that; no one was likely to forget, were they?

If I had a baby I’d have something of my own, she thought, forlorn and vulnerable and as if she were a bit of flotsam washed up at Cape Town all the way from England. A ‘baby-blue’ English girl with a bold front who had learned to enjoy shocking people. Just a little, just enough.

‘I’m in a mood,’ she thought, lying back, but turning her head so she could see the two faces, the woman’s and the babe’s. She did get moods. When she had her first, and wept and shivered, Betty told her she was homesick and the house girl made her strong coffee and said, ‘Poor medem, you are far from home.’ Yet she thanked her luck daily that she was not in Britain, where they were having such a bad time. Yes, she did miss her mummy and her dada and her little brother but she was now so different from that Daphne who had been a daughter and an elder sister. A young man who had been besotted with her had told her she was like a trembling flower. She had laughed at him, but now she thought, well, trembling flower will do for me today.

‘But I do want a baby, yes, I do, I do,’ and she allowed tears to trickle down and lose themselves in the mass of her chignon. ‘I’m going to talk to Joe again.’ And she, too, fell asleep. When the two young women woke, because the infant had let out a yell, the nanny was bending to take the child, and indicating that a big ship was coming fast towards the shore.

‘There’s the ship, medem,’ said she. ‘So now we can have a nice party.’

As the ship docked, alien in its camouflage, lines of cars were already creeping down the hilly streets towards it. All had been issued with an extra petrol ration, because this cause, giving the British troops a good time, overrode the need to save petrol. Daphne was in her car, and behind her Betty was in hers. Both women were known to the welcoming committees, who trusted them to entertain as many men as hospitality would stretch to. The sad truth was, there were too many men, not enough hostesses, and a lot of women whom normally these Cape Town matrons would not look at were being smiled at today. Somewhere a little band was playing but the bustle and sounds from the ship and the shouting of orders were too much for it.

Joe had telephoned Daphne to say, ‘They’ve had a rotten time, I’m afraid. And a sub nearly got them but they don’t know that. They deserve everything we can give them. Tell Betty her old man’s down with the Welcome Committee. And we’ve got to get a couple of hundred of them into hospital - see what we can do in four days.’ ‘Oh, so it’ll be four days?’ ‘Yes, but don’t spread it abroad. And don’t you get sick, because the hospitals’!! be full. Every spare hospital bed for miles … Don’t expect us home tonight.’

When the soldiers began to descend the gangplank, it was evident they had had a bad time. They were more like invalids than soldiers. They held on to handrails, they stared about, they were gaunt and unwell. The first of them had their hands shaken and had to stand unsteadily at ease while speeches of welcome were made. On they came towards the waiting cars, hesitated, and then, invited by welcoming waves and opening car doors, piled in, as many as could cram. Officers first. Last troopship Daphne had entertained officers, and had told Joe that this time she would take what came. And on they did come, no end to the lines of soldiers, and the ground was clearly unsteady under them; one man actually fell and had to be helped up. Daphne opened her car door to non-commissioned officers, who got in the back, five of them, and then she saw a tall lanky, awkwardly moving soldier who was reaching out his hand as if he wished there was something to hold on to. She opened the door to the seat beside hers, and he turned and blundered towards the car, held on to the door’s edge to steady himself, and collapsed into the seat. He was sweating and pale.

‘It’s been a bit of a rough voyage,’ she heard in a familiar accent from the back seat. That was a West Country voice,

‘So we’ve heard,’ said Daphne, feeling that her clean and sweet-smelling self must be dismaying these men who stank, that was the only word for it. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be sick. From this young man beside her - he seemed a boy, no more - came wave after wave of smell.

‘If there’s a chance of a wash?’ came from the back seat.

‘Or even a bath?’ came a voice from Scotland.

‘Can do,’ said Daphne, driving smartly up towards her home. On the steps stood her two maids, and the man who did the garden, and on Betty’s stood her maids and gardener. From their faces could be seen what they felt, looking at these ghosts of men.

The boy beside her woke, stumbled out of the car and up the steps and fell on to the deckchair she had been sitting in that morning, where he crouched, his head on his knees, his arms enfolding his head.

‘Baths,’ she commanded. ‘And a lot of towels.’

On Betty’s steps was the same scene.

‘We haven’t anything to change into,’ said one of the men.

‘Get all the dressing-gowns you can find - anything you can find,’ Daphne told the maids.

She looked through Joe’s clothes for something they could wear, these survivors, and one after another they emerged clean from baths and the shower, in her husband’s dressing gowns and one in an old wrapper of hers. Normally there would have been jokes about the

big man in a Japanese kimono of pink and mauve flowers. They were served tea and cakes and coffee, it being teatime. Meanwhile the young man who seemed worse off than any of them lay in a deckchair and seemed disinclined to move.

A big party was planned for tonight, here. These men were not in any state for a party. She asked them and they said they would be happy to sit still and let the earth stop swaying. Besides, there would be four days.

She left them while she telephoned to stop events going forward and went to the sick youth. He seemed in a daze or a trance. She knelt beside him and asked his name.

‘I’m James,’ he said.

‘Well, James, how about a bath and we’ll get your clothes washed.’ He tried to sit up, and she pin her arm behind him and felt the pressure of thin hones.

‘You need to put a bit of flesh on you,’ she said, trying to heave him up.

‘We were sick most of the way,’ he said, in a normal voice, smiling. She had got him up, and now stood holding him. She progressed with him to the bathroom.’! here it was evident he was not up to a bath.

‘Your mates seem to be in a better state than you.’

‘They’re sergeants,’ he said.

This meant nothing to her yet. She ran the bath and asked the house girl, Sarah, to help him into the bath and wash him. She could have done it herself, but for some reason was reluctant. While he was being washed, she thought about how to get clothes that would fit this starved young man. She telephoned her husband’s brother’s house and asked if there were any clothes for a tall thin man. The brother, who was in North Africa fighting Rommel, was thin, and tall.

A maid brought over an armful of clothes.

She handed them in through the bathroom door, and after a few minutes the youth came out, supported by Sarah, in clothes that fitted, more or less.

Now Daphne had to get these piles of stinking uniforms clean. She set the maids to work: on the lawns in front of Daphne’s house and Betty’s the four maids knelt on sacks to scrub the uniforms with scrubbing brushes on wash boards. Foam flew everywhere.

Beds were then made up all over the house. Supper was served with wine and beer, but the men were nervous of the alcohol. The frail boy, James, sat at the table with the four sergeants. Rank was abolished for the duration of this stay, the sergeant from Devon said. They were looking at roast pork and vegetables. ‘Come on, lads,’ said the Scottish sergeant, ‘we’ve got to build ourselves up.’ They did try, but the big bowl of fruit salad went down better.

It was still early. The men sat about the living-room listening to a radio news made anodyne by censorship. There was a troopship in, was allowed, but nothing was said about for how long. Did she mind if they went to bed? Off they went to their various beds, but James sat on.

Joe telephoned to find out how things were going on. She told him and he said she should ask their doctor to come up and look over the lads.

James was staring at her.

‘You’re like a vision. You can’t imagine … you forget there are lovely women, when you’re with all those men, on the ship.’

‘And so it was very bad?’

‘Yes. It was.” The impossibility of communicating it to her kept him silent, and then he put out his long thin hand, in the sleeve of Joe’s brother’s blue shirt, and touched her hand. ‘You’re real,’ he said, frowning. ‘I’m not imagining you,’ He peered into her face, serious, then smiled. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he concluded.

The maids were standing around, ready to serve coffee.

Daphne said to them, ‘Okay, that’s it, no coffee tonight.’

She went to help him up, but he managed by himself and without holding on to anything followed her to the stoep, where a hed had been made, with plenty of blankets. He sat on it and said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Daphne,’ she said.

‘Of course, a goddess’s name for a goddess.’

‘Not a goddess, just a little ordinary nymph.’

‘Don’t go changing into a laurel tree,’ he said.

She was impressed, though she had been hearing jokes about the laurel tree all her life.

‘No pyjamas,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ He slowly took off his trousers and blue shirt, and stood in Joe’s underpants, which hung on him like a loincloth. He slid into bed where he lay, looking at her with the same smile, as at a marvel.

‘You’re English,’ he said.

‘Yes, like you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘I’m in a dream,’ he said, and reached up with both arms and pulled her down. He held her. He was strong, after all. He turned his head so his face was in her neck and her hair, and said, ‘Your hair smells so wonderful.’

‘You’re going to have to let me go,’ she said,

‘Why?’ he said.

This absurdity made her laugh, and she freed herself, but he found her hand and held it to his cheek.

‘Heaven,’ he said. ‘I’m in heaven.’

And then he fell asleep and she went in, shaken, oh, yes, badly shaken, though she could not have said why. A poor half-starved waif of a boy, but smelling now of his proper smell, of man - and her heart was pumping. She sat by herself in her living-room, smoked a cigarette, another, and then rang Betty.

‘My lot are all asleep,’ she said.

‘So are mine. They are in a bad way’

‘We’ll feed them up.’

‘Then back on the ship again. It’s a shame.’

‘What price the party tomorrow night?’

‘We’ll have it, and they can join in or not as they like.’

Next morning she was up early as usual, and wandered in her wrap through the house where her charges were all lost to the world. Tom, Dick and Harry, she was calling them in her mind, for she was tending to confuse this lot with the last, of a few weeks before. She went around the garden, which tonight would be festive - it was already decked with lanterns and lights. Festive and crowded. She rang the base and got her husband and said the party would be tonight and tomorrow too, and he said he was sorry, ‘Things aren’t too … no, I’ll tell you when I see you.’

She ate her breakfast, fruit and coffee, alone. Then she was in the kitchen planning for tonight with the maids and the gardener. This was their third troopship, and the four were like old campaigners.

Not till mid-morning were there signs of life, but at last Tom, Dick and Harry - Sergeants Jerry, Ted and John - emerged yawning. She sat with them as bacon and eggs and fried tomatoes disappeared: they had their appetites hack. Because of what Joe had said, she noticed they all had rough and reddened skins, in patches. They exposed torsos and thighs to her, red and rashy, and in some places beginning to suppurate.

‘I’ve called our doctor.’

Next she went to where James was still asleep. He woke with a cry, then sat leaning on his elbow and smiling. She was sitting at a safe distance.

‘How’s your skin? The doctor’s coming.

Again she was looking at patches that were like measles or a heat rash. And his knee: it was swollen, with a scar in a puff of white flesh. And his feet were swollen and red.

‘We didn’t get our boots off much.’

He took her hand and held it to his cheek, eyes closed, his face grave, lips trembling.

‘James,’ she said, as grave as he, ‘I have a husband.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

This was certainly not the jest of the seducer, but a fair statement of the position.

‘But you do have to see the doctor.’

He kissed her hand and let it go.

One after another, the doctor examined the young men, and pronounced them all in poor shape. Libations of cold water would cure their skins: but soon they would be on the ship again. One had a cough. One had swollen glands. All had bad feet, and bruises where they had knocked themselves as the ship bucked and swung. ‘I take it you didn’t keep much down, from the look of you?’

And he ordered them to walk a couple of streets to his surgery, for various treatments.

Meanwhile Betty arrived and said to Daphne, ‘What’s up with you?’

“What do you mean?’

‘You don’t look yourself

Tin not myself.’

A confession from one and a warning from the other were preempted by Sarah in the kitchen calling, ‘Mary, Mary, where have you put the chickens, hey? ‘And Mary answering, ‘Where have I put them - when they haven’t been delivered yet?’

‘There isn’t going to be enough food,’ said Daphne and they got into Betty’s car and drove out into the countryside to any shop or butcher or bakery they could find. But others had had the same idea: shop after shop had been cleaned out. At last they found shelves still stacked with bread, and a butcher with a sheep’s carcass. They returned, with this booty, to find their charges, all ten of them, under the tree in Bettys garden, sprawling on rugs, being fed ham and chicken and salad by the maids.

‘We could drive you to see the sights,’ said Betty,

‘We could take you up Table Mountain,’ said Daphne.

The young men agreed that nothing could he better than sitting here, looking down on their enemy, the sea, which today spread out glimmering like a peacock’s tail, looking like anything but what it was, a submarine-haunted killer.

The two women and the baby sat near them on the grass, both with that maternal smile which is as good as a chastity belt. But this lot, unlike previous invasions off the troopships, looked too beaten up to be a threat. Daphne felt the gaze of the young man on her, saw his haunted hungry eyes, and then glanced at Betty, who of course would notice. He was already better, they all were: these young men were recovering as they breathed, and ate, and ate, and demolished piles of grapes. The air was heavy with the smell of liniments and ointments, there were dressings here and there on sore skins, but you would not think these were the scarecrows who had conic off the boat yesterday.

Then they confessed for a need to sleep, and all went off to their beds. It was early afternoon. All over the two gardens that were being made one by that night’s party, trestles were being set out, with piles of cutlery and plates and glasses, and smells of cooking meat came from the kitchens. Not only here, everywhere through the city, went on preparations and already men in uniforms were roaming these upper streets. There would be hundreds of them, hoping to be lucky, hoping for a welcome.

The organisations that dealt with incursions from the troopships asked for volunteers for these parties, knowing that only the incapacitated would hold back. The lucky ones were chosen by lot: names taken from a pail. For days and weeks to come slips of paper with the names of Captain E.R. Baker, Sgt. ‘Red’ Smith, Corporal Burners, Rifleman Barry, Private Jones, hundreds of them, were all over the city, in gutters, clogged on windowsills, fluttering about as the winds blew, Tom, Dick and Harry’s names were everywhere, while they were on their way to - but it had to be India.

Betty and Daphne had each put down for four hundred, knowing that the unlucky and the uninvited would be wandering up to stand like poor children at a shop window, looking in at festive gardens. And then they would be invited in: who could turn them away?The young men woke at five or so, and sleep had taken them another step towards their healthy selves. Their uniforms were clean and ironed now, and they were shaved and brushed.

At six o’clock Hetty went off to her house to dress and Daphne looked over the evening dresses in her long crammed wardrobe; she and her Joe had gone in for dancing, when she first came, the two couples had gone dancing often, and here were evening dresses pressed and ready for action.

She took out the one she thought of as her cleverest, though it could be described, simply, as a white dress. It was of white silk piqué, stiff and glossy, but a world away from the white dress she would have worn as her English self: she could see it, limp white chiffon, with pink embroidery. She put on her white armour, described on the pattern as ‘a gown of classical simplicity’. She smiled at herself in the long mirror. She shone, gleaming shoulders, the glisten of the white stuff, her hair, her eyes. She snapped on shiny jet necklace and bracelets, her grandmother’s, a mourning set; jet for mourning but just look how it set her off! And now her hair, down it fell, her yellow triumphant hair, achieved by perms, not to wave it, but to make it heavy and straight. And she peered close into her face that was enclosed in the yellow frame, and then she-was saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ She was trembling. ‘I’ve gone mad,’ she said to her reflection, but probably addressing her friend Betty. ‘Yes, I have.’ She pinned the hair up into the chignon, ageing herself by ten years into a young matron. Nothing like Ginger Rogers now (they said she was like Ginger Rogers, with her hair swinging about). Now she was the hostess, nothing more. Beside her was the English rose in her white chiffon, her invisible alter ego, the chrysalis she had discarded. A rosebud mouth smiled mistily: Daphne took her scarlet lipstick and obliterated it. Well defended, she went out, meeting Betty coming over. The two of them made a picture, and they knew it. ‘You do make a picture!’ And, ‘The dark and the light of it.’ Betty wore her dark brown silk dress. They had made their evening dresses from Vogue patterns, running them up on Singer sewing machines, side by side at a table in either house, as they felt. They were proud of their creations. ‘Dior, out of my way, “Norman Hartnell, here we come,’ they would sing to their own and each other’s reflections. Betty’s dress had lacked its finish, at first. They tried on it diamanté or ‘cluster’ brooches in strong colours. ‘Vulgar,’ they pronounced. ‘No, that’s not it …’ Daphne remembered that her English-rose self had a little necklace and bracelets of white daisies, that could have been made to go - or rather, go against - the formality, of that stiff brown gown, so apt that the two had fallen about laughing, pleased with themselves.

Two young women, so recently girls in their fathers’ houses, had found themselves in their own houses, with indulgent husbands and servants. Time and space to spread themselves, then to discover that what was strongest in them was an appetite for accomplishment. They transformed rooms with colour and texture, changed their gardens, came upon new talents every day, were like conquerors in new lands, but what they liked best was transforming themselves, with the aid of their sewing machines. Often as they flung lengths of material about, or draped themselves, they broke into fits of laughter and collapsed into chairs, helpless. ‘Just as well no one can

see us, Bets.’ ‘They’d think us lunatics.’ ‘Perhaps we are.’ And the giggles broke out again. These exuberances of healthy vitality, these festivals of self-discovery, innocent because of the flagrant enjoyment of their vanities, ended with Daphne’s miscarriage and Hetty’s getting pregnant. The zest had gone and two sober young matrons looked back on giddy girls. Now they made baby clothes and shirts for their husbands. But in their cupboard hung the results of their early intoxications, and when they arrayed themselves in this dress or that, the other would signal: ‘Oh, Bets, that was a morning, wasn’t it! ‘Daphne, we were inspired that day.’

Now they gave each other the swiftest of once-overs and got on to the serious business of the night. Already cars were delivering soldiers to the two houses, and to the others in the street, and groups of soldiers wandered up, clutching bits of paper with addresses. The gramophone, with its stacks of records, was on the stoep and beside it was the gardener, ready to wind it up and change the records. Dance music came from every house, music and voices.

Daphne checked that the furniture in the living-room had been pushed back, leaving a clear floor, and that the drink was flowing. Betty went back to her house, and both women stood on their steps waving up men and girls: all the girls in the city were available tonight, for dancing at least, each worth her weight in gold. ‘You girls are worth your weight in gold.’ ‘Call your friends, everyone, we must have girls.’

As she stood there, James came, put his arm around her, and they set off, on the stoep, cheek to cheek.

‘It’s all very well,’ she protested, trying to pull herself free.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he crooned, to the music, pulling her to him. And on and on they danced, and when she was interrupted, to be hostess, he came after her, and led her back again to the dance. Everyone was dancing: all that is, who had partners.

The gardener had positioned himself and angled the gramophone so that he could stand and look over to where on Hetty’s stoep Lynda, her maid, was in a parallel situation by the gramophone. He had been pursuing Lynda, without success, and found ‘The Night is Young and You’re So Beautiful’ a perfect expression of his feelings. He put it on again, again, ‘The Moon is High and You’re so Glamorous’, and when some dancer complained there were other tunes, he did put on something else, but returned as soon as he could to ‘The Night is Young …’ Lynda, who told him she didn’t trust him (‘You say that to all the girls,’), played as often as she could get away with it, ‘Boohoo, you’ve got me crying for you, and everything that you do …’ He might riposte with ‘Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good, oh, lady be good to me …’ And she ‘You left me in the lurch, you left me crying at the church …’

This flirtation went on all evening.

The evening was a triumph, as it was bound to be. Eight hundred? The two gardens between them and the street outside had held a good thousand. The drink held out, if the food didn’t. It was two or later before the cars that were taking some men back to their billets stopped swinging their lights tip into the trees, and the shouts and the singing of soldiers died as they descended towards the sea.

In the Wrights’ house the soldiers went off to their beds and Daphne to her room. The white dress had done her proud she told herself, full of the vainglory of an imagined victory. ‘My God, it’s as good as armour’ - stripping off jetty baubles and stepping out of the skirt which collapsed in white puffs and puckers around her legs. She went naked to bed, turned off the light, and then James arrived beside her, which she had known he would, while persuading herself he wouldn’t dare.

In the very early morning she told him to go back to his room, and he said, ‘I won’t. I can’t.’

‘The maids will be here soon.’

He did leave, and went to his bed on the stoep where already the sun was warming the glass of the bottles rolling about there. He woke to the sound of clinking glass, as the maids cleaned around him.

Down in the garden, under the tree, Daphne was standing with Betty. They were wearing flowery wraps, and James thought he had never seen such lovely women. He told himself that after that voyage, that hell, he’d think any woman an angel, but he was not in the mood for common sense. Those two women in their gowns, in the greenery of the garden, they were a vision. And he stared, as long as they stood there, consciously storing it up in his mind, a picture he could look at later, keep, and hold,

Betty was saying to Daphne, ‘For God’s sake, watch it.’

‘Is it really that obvious?’

‘Yes, it is. Of course, people were noticing.’

‘I can’t help it.’

‘But Daphne …’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Is there going to be another bloody party tonight?’

‘Of course there is. You know that. And tomorrow night too - if it’s four days.’

‘That’s what Joe said.’

They looked down to where the great ship, ominous because of its associations, stood offshore, waiting.

“Why don’t you take him off to the pondokkie?’

‘I had wondered if I should.’

‘You’ve got to get yourself out of sight.’

‘Yes.’

The pondokkie was a little house, not much more than a shed, a couple of hours drive away, by the shore. Daphne went there with Joe, for weekends; Betty and her husband used it.

“Where am I going to get petrol?’

‘I’ve still got a bit.’

‘And then there’s the party, these men, what shall I say?’

‘I’ll tell them you heard someone was sick. We’ll all manage. Don’t worry.’

‘I’ll get James up.’

‘Is that his name?’ said Betty, bitterly. ‘Suddenly, there’s a James. Who is James? If Joe finds out? Someone will tell him, you know.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Daphne again.

‘I’ll say James has gone into a clinic for a couple of days. Well, he looks as if he could do with one. For God’s sake, Daphne, he looks like the walking wounded.’

‘Yes, I know.’

The gardens were already being tidied for that night’s festivities. Soon, the stage would be set, again; the trestles scrubbed, the mounds of plates and cutlery gleaming. The skeins of paper lanterns in the trees were being re-hung and the scorched ones taken down.

The soldiers, both Daphne’s lot and Betty’s, were asleep, but James was sitting on his bed when Daphne came to say: ‘Get on your civvies, leave your uniform, come with me. Yes, now, before anyone wakes.’ He did not argue, but obediently put on Daphne’s husband’s brothers trousers and shirt. She put on slacks and a shirt and let her hair fall on her shoulders: this was like a statement of defiance, but to whom, she could not have said. In the kitchen they drank hasty cups of coffee, ignoring the maids. Daphne put some things into a box, and they set off in her car along the coast.

Betty watched them go, from her windows. She was in a seethe of conflicting feelings but most of all she felt as if her friend had been struck by lightning. Black lightning-if there was such a thing.

The streets ran smooth and citified through the suburbs, then they were on a rough road, the sea on their right hand, and what looked like farmland on their left. Vines and oak trees, a fair and smiling scene, but soon the land was unworked, with only a few scattered sheep. James looked only at Daphne, until she put out a hand and touched his face with her knuckles. ‘Stop it, you’re making me nervous.’

‘I can’t help it,’ he said, as she had earlier. She smiled and he said bitterly, ‘It’s not just an amusement for me.’ And then, ‘Stop the car, stop it now.’

She drove until they were on the edge of a little bay where waves frisked among low black rocks. He moved up to put his arm round her. His face … it frightened her, and he was trembling. Not many cars came along this road, but now she saw one approaching.

‘James, wait. Let’s just get there,’

“Where?’

‘You’ll see.’

She put the car in motion again. She saw his face staring down past her at a postcard sea, gulls swooping, sea noise, bird noise, and the sunlight a moving glitter to the horizon. No ships.

‘I hate the sea,’ he said, ‘I hate it. It’s out to get us. And it will.’

‘Don’t look at it.’

So he looked at her, shifting his head a little, but past her head was the glare of the sea.

They turned inland. There was a broken gate. Scrubby unkept land: you’d never guess the sea was a couple of hundred yards oft”. Then a turn towards it, through low bushes, and ahead a shack or shed, with the bushes growing close all round it.

The car stopped. She lifted out the box of provisions, gathered from the party leftovers, and a big enamel can of water, which he took from her. She went ahead along a faint path, the bushes seeming to want to clutch and bring her down, to a door which she opened with a large key. Inside was dark, till she pulled down shutters. Light showed, first, a wide high bed, piled with all kinds of covers, then shelves around wooden walls, with dishes and plates, and a small wooden table in the middle on a plank floor, with two wooden chairs.

‘Our holiday home,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’

James might have said that he seemed to spend his life now in sheds or huts - this one was called a pondokkie. What’s in a name? A little house, like one in a fairytale, m the woods. But they were scrubby bushes, smelling of salt.

The sea was a murmur, not too far away, with an occasional splash as a wave broke on a rock. The two stood looking at each other. The feverish state that had enclosed them since his arrival in the setting of fine house and gardens might have dissolved here and now, but it didn’t. They sank on to the two wooden chairs, and, holding each others hands across the table, stared, serious, quiet -and oddly, with bitterness, directed, not at each other, but at Fate, the war, something not themselves. She stroked his face with a hand that had pearly pink nails. He thought, those nails wouldn’t survive long if she really lived in this pondokkie, a rough hut. This clean and shiny sweetly-smelling woman, this was just where she played … and was he what she was playing with?

‘Wipe that bloody lipstick off.”

She opened her bag, found a handkerchief and he took it from her and carefully but thoroughly removed the scarlet lips.

‘There now,’ he said.

She said, ‘Let’s go and look at the sea. The tide’s out.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

Gravely, he took her hand and led her to the bed. Through the open window, came the smell of salt-stung vegetation. Silence except for the murmur of the sea. Their lovemaking, trembling and hungry, seemed to celebrate not love but tragedy. They fell asleep and she woke to find him screaming, his hands over his ears.

‘What is it?’ he shouted.

‘The tide’s in.’

It seemed that the ocean was rolling in to focus on just that stretch of shore so close to their shelter that the next wave would rear and crash down on it, dragging them out to sea. The little house shook, the earth shook, crash, crash and then a thundering withdrawal: it was as if they were deep under the sea, buried in it.

His face was in her breasts and he was crying, not like a child, oh, no, a deep choking sobbing, and he was clutching to her as if they were helplessly rolling in deep surf.

‘It’s like this when it’s high tide - this must be an unusually high one.’ Her voice was like a hush within the pounding tumult. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t think.’

‘But I’m with you,’ she heard, as another wave crescendoed and crashed.

‘We’ll get up and go and look at it. You’ll see, it’s quite a way off, fifty yards at least.’

‘No, no, no.’

‘All right, then, get up and we’ll have some supper.’

‘I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to waste the time,’

She slid out, standing naked to smile at him, gravely, for this was the note that had been struck from their first moment, but there was something there, what? - melancholy? Well, that was in order, but surely not this edge of bitterness?

‘What is it?’ he asked, a too-ready suspicion flaring,

‘I don’t know,’ she said, defeated, turning to set out bread and butter and ham. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I am trying to laugh at us.’

‘At me!’

‘Never you,’ she said. ‘Two days. Two. And I feel …’

‘Well, tell me, yes, tell me. I want to know … am I the first bloody soldier you brought here?’

Well, thank you. If that’s what you think. I think we should leave.’ She was crying; he sat on the edge of the bed, and was about to get up and go to her but then he crouched down with his hands over his ears as a wave crashed, seemingly just above them.

‘Why me? Yes, why me? But I don’t care. You’re wonderful - and that’s enough.’ And he ducked down as the little house shook.

‘I care,’ and she sat down, laid her head on her arms on the table and wept.

He left the bed and sat opposite, stroking her hair, watching her cry.

Then he put out his hand, got up, took her hand and said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s get back to bed.’ And he led her weeping on to the bed, and lay down beside her.

‘This little house, this pondokkie of yours, I won’t go back on the ship, I’ll just hide here, and you can come and visit me.’

After the wedding of Joe Wright, bachelor, and Daphne Brent, spinster, they had taken a week of conventional honeymoon in a smart hotel up country, famous as a haven for newlyweds, and then he had brought her here. It was not likely that she failed to think, ‘I bet he brought his girls here when he was a bachelor.’ This did not make her jealous. She rather liked the idea of this frail shelter, that seemed always about to dissolve into the sea, as a place for lovers. In this very room she and Joe, naked and happy, had made love and eaten picnic food and then run exultantly shouting down to the sea at low tide. And now she was here with this man, but she was in a different dimension with him. If Joe walked in now he would come from a sane and healthy world and she would look at him from this dream she was in - a nightmare, was it? - and then disappear, with a shriek, and he’d think he had seen an apparition from a nether world. Such pain, in this young man and in her, and she did not know where hers had come from: she had never envisaged unhappiness in her blueprints for the future. She had not experienced it. She did not know this youth: he was a stranger and this element where she found herself with him was alien. And yet, knowing that soon she would lose him, made her want to do something primitive and brutal, like pulling out her hair, beating her breasts with her fists, sit swaying, sick with grief, a black cloth over her head.

Soon she was lying with a sleeping man in her arms - if he were a Jeep, and not in some kind of trance: he trembled, or came to himself in little shuddering spasms. She lay with her eyes shut, holding him, and lived through a memory of something that happened soon after she came to South Africa. She and Joe, Betty and Henry and another couple had driven off into the mountains, following little roads known to the South Africans from boyhood rambles. They stopped the cars, not in a campers’ site, but where baboons had made a cliff their own. All up the face of the cliff, from rocks and holes that were the openings to ancient caves, the baboons perched and clung and barked at them. The humans took no notice. A few yards from the cliff, in the middle of a little plateau formed by slabs of rock split by heat and cold was a little tree. It was dead, a pale spectral thing growing from between the rocks. Dead. It was midday and strong light made the dry leaves hang whitish, sketched m air, with heat waves shimmering around them like the volatile oils made visible. Bread and wine and fruit were set out, and the women cubed some meat. The men set light to the dead tree. The idea was, it would fall and they would use it as fire for their meat. The tree flared up, it was at once a torch of white-hot flames. The baboons on their cliff barked their fear, the humans fell back, the tree was a river of flame, a rush of white sparks. Daphne was standing too close. The quick flare took her by surprise; she could feel the hairs on her arms frizzle. She was struck by the intensity of the fire into an immobility. She cried out, and Joe leaped to her and pulled her back out of the heat that was now shimmering and oiling for yards around the tree.

That was how she felt now*.

‘Too close,’ she was murmuring, eyes closed, holding a naked man lost in his dream. ‘It’s too close,’

When the light came, the waves began to come close again, and roar and pound, and they held each other, and listened, until the noise abated, and she said, ‘Now, I want you to come out and look,’

i told you I wish I need never see the ocean again.’

‘I know, but come on.’

It was late morning. The sea was in retreat. She took him through the push and clutch of the salty bushes to a little patch of sand, still wet, but drying pale on its surface, and beyond were tall black rocks, where seaweed clung. The sea was rough today, jumping and leaping about among the rocks.

‘Do you ever swim here?’ he asked.

‘Over there is a pool in the rocks. It’s safe, when the tides out.’ She stopped herself asking if he’d like to go in, just in time.

They stood with their arms about each other allowing themselves to be hypnotised by the seas noise, but she could feel him tense, discouraged.

‘It’s only sea,’ she said, though she knew he was rejecting the moment, and probably, her. ‘There it is, kept in its place, it can’t get us.’ And wished she could unsay it; she had forgotten he would be back on the ship.

‘When the war’s over I’ll never go near a ship again.’

She began to cry. She was forlorn and rejected. Why was she? She did not know herself. Her emotional extremes, sorrow, exultation, grief, passion, were leaving her rather like that fish she could see, flapping in the sand. That James should hate the sea so much: she could not bear it. She had often thought that when she came to marry Joe, it was to the sea she had come, the ocean surrounding her always, never out of sight, or out of mind. Joe’s gift to her had been the sea, so she had told him she felt.

He said, ‘I’m not going back on that ship, I won’t.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me.’

‘What?

Why had she said that? She felt as if she had tripped a switch, moved a gear, was in an uncoordinated helpless condition, and anything she said must come out inept, tactless, even brutal.

She clutched him by the shoulders and saw him wince: she let him go. His singlet, which he had put on to leave the hut, was stuck here and there in ruddy patches.

‘Oh, God,’ she said.

‘The sea spray,’ he said, ‘it’s getting to me.’

She should not have brought him out here, she should have thought, everything had gone wrong.

‘Come on, let’s go in,’ he said.

The tide was turning, beginning to thunder and crash; she felt he was estranged from her; he felt he had failed her.

She took his hand and led him back to the hut. As they went through the bushes, a Coloured Lad came with a note in his hand. He was from the local shop a mile away where there was a telephone.

The note said: ‘Daphne, he’s got to be back on board by tomorrow, midday, Betty.’

She said to the youth, whom she knew, from previous trips here, with her husband, ‘Come to the hut, I’ll give you some money.’ This was done. He was giving her odd looks, as well he might: would he think this money a bribe?

Then she said to James, ‘Deadline for you - twelve tomorrow.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘We’ve got another afternoon and night.’

‘We’ve got all our lives.’

Back inside the hut, they were together again in feeling: the emptiness that had claimed them by the sea had gone.

‘I’ll come for you, after the war.’

She held him close, her head on his shoulder, and felt the rough skin under her cheek.

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said gently, tenderly, as to a child, ‘but it’s true.’

The afternoon and then the night went past, while the tide came in, and thundered over them, and went out, came in. It was low tide when she got off the bed and began packing up. She was afraid he ‘was not going to move, but at last he did.

‘We should have something to eat.’

‘I suppose so.’

They sat with some bread and jam between them and looked at each other.

‘I’ll think of you like this. You’re like a little girl, your hair all over the place. And your face needs washing.’

When they walked back through the bushes to the car, clumps of white spume were flying in on a cold wind, and spattered the bushes.

She drove in silence. He watched her all the way; she received that long look like a prolonged embrace.

At the house, Hetty came running. ‘Our lads have gone. I took them down. They’re already on the ship.’

Her two maids, and her gardener, Daphne’s maids and her gardener, stood on the respective steps, watching, as the soldier went in to Daphne’s house. Daphne staying outside, by the car. He came out in his uniform.

‘I’ll take you,’ said Betty. ‘No, you stay, Daphne.’ Daphne was not fit to drive down to the docks: she was trembling, and had to hold on to the car.

Betty ran back to her house, drove her car to outside Daphne’s, hooted and sat waiting.

Daphne and the soldier stood face to face, not touching, looking. Betty hooted again. The soldier broke away, and ran, pulling his kitbag bumping along behind him. From the car he sent one look back and then, oddly, saluted. He got in. Betty’s car shot off down into the town.

The scene broke. Daphne moved slowly up to the stoep and sat on the end of a wicker lounger as if she might fall through it.

The four maids went back to their duties, the gardeners to their plants.

Mid-afternoon. The great ship stood in its nest of white frills. From here would be seen the activity of embarking; ants crawled everywhere over the ship.

Daphne did not move. Sarah came from inside the house with a tray of tea, which she had not ordered. When her mistress took no notice, Sarah poured a cup of tea. sugared it, held it out to Daphne and said, ‘Your tea, medem.’ Daphne shook her head. The black woman lifted Daphne’s limp arm, and put the cup in her hand.

‘You must have some tea, medem.’

Daphne sat still, her eyes on the docks, and then at last she did drink.

‘That’s right, medem.’

The maid left the tray and went in.

Late afternoon. Betty’s car was nosing up the street, and then she was beside Daphne. ‘He made it. Just.’

Daphne motioned Ącave me with her hand.

Was the distance between the ship and the dock widening?

‘Joe rang. I told him you were ill.’

No reply.

‘He said the ship was leaving so as to get out of Cape Town while it is light - in ease there’s a sub about.’

Daphne let out a cry and then slammed her fist against her mouth. She said, ‘I’m a very wicked woman, do you know that? I don’t love Joe. I never did. I married him under false pretences. I should be punished for that.’

‘You had better lie down.’

Daphne began to cry. She stared down after the ship, her hands tugging at her hair tangled with salt spray and wind. Her face had forgotten make-up: her husband would recognise that English girl with her baby mouth, now woeful; as she looked now she would not easily be recognised by her admiring guests. Dreadful, deep sobs, and she was swaying as she sat.

‘Do you have any sedatives? Daphne?’

Daphne did not move or respond.

Betty went to call Sarah, who was in the room just behind, keeping an eye on what went on. ‘Help me get Mrs Wright to her bed. Then I’m going to the chemist for medicine.’

It took the two of them to lift Daphne: she did not want to go in till the ship had disappeared. The three women stood, the maid and Betty holding Daphne, while the ship dwindled over the horizon. They walked her to her bed, laid her down and Betty said, ‘Hold the fort, I’ll be quick.’ And in a few minutes she was back. Daphne lay on her bed, staring. Betty put an arm around her, lifted her, and made her swallow two tablets.

Daphne collapsed: her eyes closed.

And now Betty and Sarah stood together: slowly, carefully, their eyes met, and held.

When Daphne had arrived in South Africa she had criticised Betty, the South African born and bred, for behaving in front of her staff as if they did not exist. One day Betty had come out of her bathroom naked and walked across her bedroom in full sight of the gardener who was at work just outside the french windows. She had stood there and talked, brushing her hair, and turned about, as if the man were not there, and when Daphne told her off, she realised for the first time that her servants had become as invisible as mechanical servitors. They were paid well - for this was liberal Cape Town (‘We pay our people much better than they do in Joburg, fed, taken to the doctor, given generous hours off. But they were not there for Betty, as human beings. Remorse, if that was the wort!, had adjusted her behaviour and her thoughts, and she became noticing and on

guard, watching what she did and what she said. But she could not think of anything apt for this situation. The four maids, hers and Daphne’s, were friends and knew the other maids along the street: this went for the gardeners. Hy now all of them would be discussing Daphne and the soldier. Any one of them might tell Joe.

‘Mrs Wright is very sick,’ said Betty at last, knowing she was blushing because of the feebleness of it. And it had sounded like a plea, which she didn’t like.

Sarah said, ‘Yes, medem.’ Compassionate, yes: but no doubt there was derision there, a forgivable allowance, in the circumstances.

‘Yes,’ said Betty. She was in the grip of the oddest compulsion. Like Daphne, she could have tugged at her locks with both hands; instead she passed her hands across her face, wiping away whatever expression might be there - she didn’t want to know. And now, she couldn’t help herself, she let out a short barking laugh and clapped a hand across her mouth.

‘Yes, medem,’ said Sarah, sighing. She turned and went off.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Betty. She took a last hopeless look at her friend who was lying there, struck down. Somewhere over the horizon, that soldier was on his way north into the dark of the Indian Ocean.

Betty went to her house, sat on her dark steps, and in her mind’s eye persisted the sight of Daphne, lying white-faced and hardly breathing.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no,’ said Betty wildly, aloud, and sank her face into her hands, ‘No. I don’t want it. Never,’

Sometime later Joe’s car came up, Betty went to intercept him. At once he began talking. ‘Betty, Henry won’t be back tonight, he asked me to tell you, it’s been a real dingdong these last few days, you’ve no idea, getting in enough supplies and everything, it’s not been easy - for the ship, you know, the one that’s just left.’ He was talking too loudly, and walked past her up his steps, and turned.

And stood talking into the garden, where she stood, ‘We lost a ship - the Queen of Liverpool - no, forget I said that, I didn’t say it. Five hundred men gone. Five hundred. It was the same sub that was chasing the - the ship that’s just left. Hut we got her. Before she sank she got the sub. Five hundred men.’ He was now walking about, gesticulating, not seeing her, talking, in an extreme of exhaustion. ‘Yes, and the ship that’s gone, they left us twenty-five. They’re in a bad way. They’re mad. Claustrophobia, you know, stress. I don’t blame them, below the water line, well, they’re in hospital. They’re crazy. Henry saw them. When he gets home, he’ll need looking after himself. Five hundred men - that’s not something you can take in. Henry hasn’t really slept since the ship got in.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘So, you must make allowances. He won’t be himself. A pretty poor show all around, these last four days. And I’m not myself either.’ And he went striding towards the bedroom.

‘Daphne’s not well. She’s taken a sedative.’

‘If there’s any left, I’ll take one too.’

Hetty went with him into the bedroom.

The sight of his wife stopped him dead.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Probably some bug. Don’t worry. She’ll be all right tomorrow I expect.’

‘Good Lord,’ he said again. She took pills from the bottle by the bed, gave them to him, and he downed them with a gulp from Daphne’s glass.

He sank down to sit on the bed. ‘Betty,’ he said, ‘five hundred men. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ He stood up, pulled off his boots, first one, thump, then the other, thump; walked around to the other side of Daphne, lay down and was asleep.

Betty went to tell the maids that no supper would be needed. ‘Go off home. That’s right.’

‘Thank you, medem.’

Betty returned to stand near the bed. Daphne had not moved.

Joe lay there, beside his wife, Good-fellow Joe, everybody’s friend, rubicund and jovial, but there he lay, and Hetty would not have known him. He kept grimacing in his sleep, and grinding his teeth, and then, when he was still, his mouth was dragged down with exhaustion.

Betty switched off the light. She returned to her house over dark lawns and sat for a long time, in the dark. Four days. There had been so much noise; soldiers with their English voices, telephones, cars coming and going, dance music, the same tunes played over and over again on die gramophone, while feet in army boots scraped and slid, but now the noise was subsiding, another voice that had been speaking all the time was becoming audible, in an eloquence of loss, and endurance. Four days the troopship had been in. A long way off, on the other side of a chasm, of an abyss, smiled life, dear kind ordinary life.

Down the gangways they came, between the guns that had been ready to defend them all the way from Cape Town, Hues of men, hundreds, to form up in their platoons and companies on the quays, where James was already standing at ease, though at ease he was not, for his feet hurt like, it is safe to say, the feet of most of those young men, some of whom had been there for over an hour, under an unwelcoming sun. These soldiers were not in as bad a way as getting on for a month ago, in Cape Town. Beneficent Cape of Good Hope had loaded the ship with food, and above all fruit. Foot boys who had scarcely tasted a grape in their lives had consumed luscious bunches until the bounty ran out. Three weeks this time, not a month, and the Indian Ocean had been kind except for a four-day storm halfway across, when conditions had been similar to

those in the Atlantic. James stood narrowing his eyes against the glare, holding himself so as not to faint; and he watched the great ship and, if hatred could kill, then it would have sunk there and then and be gone forever.

It was very hot. The air was stale and clammy. Thin dark men in loincloths hurried about being told what to do by dark men in uniform, who were being supervised by white men in uniform. No smell of sea now, though it was so near, only oil and traffic fumes. At last the endless lines did end, while men were still forming into their companies. Some had already moved off, to the accompaniment of the barking sounds of the sergeants, which James now found soothing, being reminders of order and regularity. James’s company were marched to a barracks, where they were fed, and showered off the seawater which on some skins still festered. Hundreds of naked young men, but while they were in nothing like as bad shape as in Cape Town they were still the walking wounded, patched with red rough skin and fading bruises. They would be sent to the train tomorrow, which would take them to their destination: unnamed. The name, its harsh alien syllables was whispered about through the hundreds of soldiers who were already thinking of it as a haven where they would at last keep still, lose the sway of the ship. Camp X was what they had to call it. The smell in the barracks was enough to make them sick, despite the showers.

Authority on this second stage of the voyage, remembering the twenty-five madmen they had left behind in Cape Town, the dozens that had gone into hospital to be patched up, and the shocking physical state of the disembarking men, had chosen not to notice that more and more slept on the decks, and, disregarding regulations, simply did not turn up for the ritual of the seawater douches. All that voyage had been very hot. The sickroom was full of cases of diarrhoea, and again officers had to double up so as to provide accommodation for another sickbay. There were always queues for the ship’s doctors. That fruit in unaccustomed stomachs, the feasting and drunkenness at Cape Town, added to the queues for the latrines. If an epidemic broke out - and why not? - what was to be done? Five thousand men, most already run down, many coughing: it was a poor show, and no ship’s officers had ever been more relieved to see a port appear at last.

In the barracks that night the soldiers lay on top of their bedding and cursed, and sweated. The attendant corporals and sergeants, as sick as their men, dismayed and homesick, advised patience, in raucous voices. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll fucking well be patient,’ shouts Sergeant Perkins.

As for James, he did not divide the voyage into two stages, England-Cape Town, Cape Town-Bombay. It had been one long suffering, consuming him, body and soul, interrupted by four days of heaven.

Through the three weeks of die Indian Ocean James, sick and sore, sat with his back against a cabin wall and dreamed … It was a dream, that place, with its mountain spilling cloud like a blessing over its lucky inhabitants. A dream of big cool houses in gardens. He held in his mind that scene of two young women, one dark, one fair, in their flowery wraps under a big tree, that scene; and the nights with Daphne, and one memory in particular, Daphne seeming to shine in the lamplight, her yellow hair spreading on white shoulders, holding out her arms to him. And dancing cheek to cheek. And how the sea had thundered over them, deep in love, crashed and banged and sucked, but then retreated, harmless.

A dream of happiness. He would hold it in his mind and not think of anything at all, only that, until this bloody war ended.

Meanwhile he was in a barracks with fifty men, cursing and scratching and calling out in their sleep, if you could call that sleep, and in the morning he marched with the others to the trains that would take them to Camp X, which it turned out was two days’ travelling away. The conditions on the train matched those on the ship for discomfort but at least a train goes straight, more or less, it doesn’t sway and lurch about. James watched the landscape of middle India go past and hated it. The Cape wasn’t alien, with its oaks and its vineyards and its fruit, he had felt at home in a landscape where nothing said: You don’t belong.

When they at last reached Camp X, somewhere in the middle of India, and marched in their companies on to the parade ground - the maidan - half the camp was of new shiny huts, or sheds. In other words, Nissen huts, and white tents covered the rest of the ground. There was a race, everyone knew, though no one had told them, to get the huts up before the monsoon started. Under their feet as they marched or stood at ease was a powdery dark dust, that puffed up and fell in drifts. The smell, what was the smell, wood smoke and pungency and much else, and the soldiers sniffed and tasted the air, this dusty foreign air, while a sun like a brass band blared down on them.

In lines and in queues the men waited at Medical. Rashes and bad feet, eye infections, stomach disorders, coughs, these soldiers were more fit for an infirmary than for fighting, and James’s knee was up again, like a lump of uncooked dough, with a scar stretched across it. His feet were swollen.

A couple of hundred men were taken to hospitals in the region and the rest were told they would be given two weeks’ leave. If they had nowhere to go - and most would not - they would stay in camp and provision would be made for their relaxation. It seemed there were clubs and bars in town that were prepared to entertain Other Ranks. James was told he was among those invited to stay with a certain Colonel Cram and his wife, to recuperate. That is, he was in a category not bad enough for hospital, but not fit enough for drilling and exercising.

He and nine others were driven off to a big bungalow m a garden full of heavy dark trees that were spattered here and there with pink,

red and white flowers. The smell, the smell, what was it? - a heavy flower smell but the other, pungent, hanging in their nostrils like a reminder of their foreignness. Unknown birds emitted unfamiliar noises. In a garden a black man in a white shirt squatted doing something to a bush. This one had a twist of cloth on his head, but in Cape Town the gardeners in the young women’s gardens wore cast-off good clothes, and old canvas shoes.

Colonel Grant was Indian Army Retired, and a friend of the colonel in James’s regiment, and was now waiting for the war to let him go Home to England. The Grants’ war effort was to entertain soldiers needing a respite. The men did not know each other, though some faces were familiar because of the weeks on the ship. These were all soldiers. Other Ranks, and this was because of a decision by Colonel Grant, since it was always officers who were asked out. James who had been Other Ranks now in various places for two years, had ceased to notice that his way of speaking marked him apart. The sergeants had sometimes picked him out for sarcasm but there was something about how he took this attention that took the fun out of it for them. Here was this quiet, obedient young man, obviously straining to keep up, to hear what was said, to do his best, but not too painfully: James was not victim material. He did not notice now that he was the odd man among these ten soldiers but the Grants did. And he had brought books in his kitbag. The supper was at a long table, once used for formal and probably grand occasions, but now accommodating men not used to them. The food was English, heavy and plentiful.

Mrs Grant was gracious, she was trying hard. A large, red-faced woman, she was uncomfortable in her skin, for she was sweating, and kept holding her face up to the draughts of warm air - not cool but at least moving - from the punkahs. She had patches of dark under her arms, and her pleasant, or at least trying-to-please face smiled conscientiously as she made conversation.

‘And what part of Home do you come from?’

‘Bristol …’ in a strong West Country voice. ‘I’m a plumber by trade.’

‘How mee. How very useful. And do you - I’m afraid I didn’t get your name … ?’

Then it came to James, who sat preoccupied, apart from the others in spirit, which showed on his abstracted face that was frowning with the effort to be here, to be part of things, to behave well, ‘And you, forgive me for not remembering … where are you from?’

‘Near Reading. I was still at college when the war started.’

‘How nice. And what were you studying?’

‘Office management and secretarial.’

Here, Colonel Grant, who had exchanged glances with his wife, because of this more refined voice among the other rougher ones, said, ‘You’ll all have a full day tomorrow. The Medicals will be here early. We start things early here - because of the heat, you know …’

‘It doesn’t matter how early we start, you can never get the better of the heat,’ fretted Mrs Grant.

‘So, I suggest you all get your heads down early and tomorrow we’ll see’

‘I am sure you would all like some coffee?’ Mrs Grant said.

Now the men hung about, exchanging looks. James said he would like coffee, but Colonel Grant said, ‘Probably you’d prefer a good cup of tea. Yes, well, that’s easy. When you are in your billets just clap your hands and ask for char.’

The men were disposed in cottages in the gardens: except for two. One was James: he found that his name, down for a cottage, had been without explanation changed for a guest room in this house.

No explanation needed, when you thought about it, and now he did. He was uncomfortable, but consoled himself that his fellow house guest was an electrician from Bermondsey, who said he fancied a cup of tea if they didn’t mind and shot off into the dark towards the cottages. That left James, drinking coffee with the Grants, who told him to make himself at home, borrow what books he liked, and play the gramophone.

James lay on his bed in the dark, too hot between covers, and saw bats swoop past the window gauze. The smell, had there been a characteristic smell in Cape Town? He didn’t think so. Only the scent of Daphne’s skin and hair … and so he drifted off to sleep and if he woke and cried out there was no one there to hear.

Next morning a couple of young women in the uniform of some nurses’ voluntary service arrived to check them over. Again James’s knee was strapped. All ten soldiers sat about in the cottages with their feet in strong-smelling potions, all had their sore skins medicated: nil were on their way to recovery.

Now, a problem: nine men already half-mad with boredom, and here they were m this refined and subdued household and what they wanted was some fun - precisely, to get drunk.

But the Grants had thought of that. In the town was a club which would welcome them, and a short walk would take them there. Better wait until evening until it cools down a bit.

That left James, who didn’t want any club, other soldiers, distractions from his private thoughts. He wanted to sit on this verandah and watch the birds and think about Cape Town. That meant Daphne, but not exclusively. He was thinking, ‘Imagine, we could have been stationed there - couldn’t we? But instead we are here.’ The enormity of Chance, or Fate, preoccupied him, and he sat for hours, a book open on his knee, thinking so deeply that the Colonel’s approach was not noticed until the old man coughed and sat down.

‘I hope I am not disturbing you?’

‘No, no, - of course not, sir.’

On James’s knee was Kipling’s Collected Verses. Kipling had not been offered in the summer schools of that year which now seemed so long ago. Kipling! What would Donald have said?

The bookshelves of the Grants’ living room were full of red leather volumes tooled in gold - and many of them were Kipling.

The Colonel leaned forward, took in the title, leaned back. He said, ‘A good lad, Kipling. Though he’s out of favour now.’

I haven’t read him before, sir.’

‘I’d be interested to hear what you make of it. Your generation … you see things differently.’

Outside this bungalow, beyond the tree-shaded garden, on the dusty road, groups of Indians went past in their many colours.

‘What’s that bird, sir?’

‘Crows. Indian crows. Not like ours, are they?’

‘They sound as if they’ve got sore throats. Like mine.’

The Colonel laughed: clearly, he was relieved to laugh. James’s pale intensity disturbed him.

‘We’ve got all kinds of germs. It’s the dust. Filthy. But you’ll get immune, with luck,’

‘And do you get immune to the heat, sir?’

The Colonel looked at the patches of dressing on James’s arms and legs, below the uniform shorts; he knew there were more dressings, where they were invisible. The redness on James’s neck was prickly heat. ‘No, you don’t get used to that, I’m afraid.’ A pause. ‘I’m afraid my wife takes it hard, after all these years. She spends as much time as she can in the hills but at the moment she wants to do her bit, so she’s here, and she’s not made for it. You must have noticed.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And where are your comrades?’

‘They’re exploring the town.’

‘Poor lads, not much for them to do.’

‘We’re all pleased to be off the ship, sir.’

‘Yes, I heard you had a bad time.’

He got up, nodded, and went off. But he took to dropping in to join James on the verandah, for chats that were brief, but as James saw, not without purpose.

‘Didn’t they offer you a commission?’

‘Yes, I turned it down. Now, I wonder why?’

‘You might have had things a bit easier.’

‘I thought so on the troopship, yes.’

Yes:

And another time, looking at the red volume on James’s knee.

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The Captains - and the Kings depart.

‘They don’t seem to be departing, sir. Far front it..’

‘That’s what they want us to do. The Indians. Depart. You might have noticed.’

James had now been in India for a week and he had not done more than glance at a newspaper.

‘Riots.’ Free India. “India for the lndians. “The British Tyranny.’

Months of socialist indoctrination, which of course had to include ‘Free India’, had slid off James. He thought, Well, India for the Indians: that makes sense.

‘The lot before you. The previous regiment. They’ve gone to Burma.’

‘Yes, we know.’

‘Before they left they were suppressing riots in … pretty close to here. They put down quite a nasty spot of bother. What do you think about that?’

James thought that if you were a soldier you did what you were told, bad luck.

‘Mine is not to reason why, sir.’

The Colonel laughed. ‘Very wise!’

‘Are we going to Burma, sir?’ James dared.

‘I don’t know. No, I really don’t.’

‘And if you did you wouldn’t tell me.’

‘And if I did I couldn’t tell you. But as you know, the Japs are threatening to invade India and free it from our tyranny. And they’re getting closer all the time.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And some troops will be kept here, in case of that.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes, it looks like that.’

And another conversation, towards the end of that visit, which James was hardly to remember later, so little impression did it make on him, compared with the vividness of Cape Town.

The Colonel had come on to the verandah, his boots loud on the wooden floor, and he stood looking at the soldier, who was lost to the present and staring, his mouth a little open.

‘James …’

James did hear, after a pause, then smiled, stood as the Colonel sat down. He sat down again himself.

The Colonel said, ‘You know, this isn’t an easy country for some of us - well, some do seem to flourish like the green bay tree. Not many. It takes it out of you.’ Now he hesitated, trying to think of the right thing to say. He shifted his lengthy legs about in the cream linen trousers which had a shine on them from someone’s iron. With one thin sunburned hand he rubbed his chin, while he stared thoughtfully, not at James, but into the garden.

‘Are you sleeping - may I ask?’

‘Not too well. It is so hot.’

‘Yes, it is, things’ll get better when the monsoon conies. Not long now.’

‘The monsoon, everyone talks about it as if it’s some kind of magic wand.’

‘Well, it is. Yes, that’s what it is. James - if I’m talking out of turn, then forget it. But I want to say, you mustn’t take things too hard. Bad idea anywhere, but in this country … it tips people over the edge, India does, if you don’t get a grip of yourself. We aren’t made for this climate. It does us in. I’ve seen it … I’ve been here forty years. Too long. I’d be home now if it wasn’t for the war.’

If James had taken this in, it didn’t show on his face; he didn’t move, or look at the Colonel.

‘Think about what I’m saying, will you? Try and take things a little easier.’

‘Yes, sir. Yes … it’s that ship, you see. I don’t think you can have any idea …’ One does not say to an old man that he hasn’t an idea, not about anything. ‘I mean … I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean …’And then, angry, white-faced: ‘It was terrible. It was . , .’ And he brought two clenched fists frustrated ly down on his chair arms. His book fell, and the Colonel picked it up, sat turning pages. He read aloud:

‘Cities and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as Ą0II$ as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth

The Cities rise again.

I often recite that to myself when things get rough.’ ‘Yes, sir.’

‘A sense of proportion, one must keep that.’ ‘Yes, sir,’

‘And you do forget, you know, one does forget.’

‘I will never forget, sir, never, never;

‘I see. I’m sorry’ And the Colonel moved off.

On the day the cars came to take the Grants’ guests back to their camp, the air seemed full of rubbish. A wind was busy in the trees, whirling leaves and even small branches out into the roads where people scurried into doorways and holes in a jumble of shops and little houses, and shopkeepers struggled to put up their shutters to save their goods being whisked into the air. Mouths were dry. Eyes stung from the dust.

The cars passed a platoon, accompanied by their corporal, returning from some jaunt associated with the two weeks’ leave. Their eyes were screwed up, their mouths clenched tight, against the sun and the dust. This made them look indignant. Ten expostulating men with the dirt running off them as they marched, and the dust in clouds as high as their knees. The two cars passing raised the dust even more and looking back, the passengers saw a ghostly platoon vanish in a dirty cloud.

The men went to report their return, and James was told that ‘it had been suggested’ he should take a commission and then join Administration. Who had suggested? It could only be Colonel Grant, who was a friend, he had said, of Colonel Chase. ‘Nine to Five,’ thought James. ‘It’s my fate.’

‘Get to Medical tomorrow and then report back.’

James was in a long hut that housed twenty, rather like the hut which was his first home as a soldier getting on for three years ago. None of the men he had been with in Britain were here, but some were fellow sufferers from the ship. On twenty beds, ten to a side, young men sat, listening to the wind fling dust at their shelter.

‘Christ, what a country’

No one disagreed.

They began exchanging news about their two weeks’ leave. All grumbled; nothing to do, a couple of clubs, so called’ making a favour of admitting Other Ranks, a few Eurasian girls, anyone fucking those bints was asking for it, again a shortage of beer, the heat, the heat, the heat.

Then one said to James, ‘We hear we’re going to have to salute you, sir.’

This was unfriendly. James who had listened to routine criticisms, amounting to hatred, of the officers, realised he was now on the other side.

‘So it seems,’ he said.

A soldier gave him a mock salute from where he sat.

‘Enough of that,’ said the corporal,

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘Administration,’ said James. Ten-pushing.’

‘Better than square bashing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said James.

‘And how was it at your Colonel’s?’

One of the men in the hut had been among the ten, and now James said, ‘Ask Ted, he’ll tell you.’

‘Fucking awful,’ said Ted, ‘And she’s …’ he screwed his forefinger at his forehead.

‘Suited me,’ said James, annoyed at the ingratitude. ‘I needed a bit of quiet after that voyage.’

‘Quiet,’ said Ted. ‘I’d like a bit of action.’

‘Perhaps they’ll move us on,’ said someone.

‘And perhaps not,’ said James. And he told them what Colonel Grant had said: some regiments were to be kept in India in case of a Jap invasion.

Groans and curses,

‘Roll on the bloody peace.’

In the night, the monsoon arrived and rain battered so loud on their roof that few slept. In the morning the dust of yesterday was in deep chocolate pools where foam scudded as the wind blew.

The men got to breakfast wet and hot. They went to Medical -hot and wet.

‘Hows that knee?’

‘Better,’ said James. It was a lean healthy knee again.

‘I see you play cricket. I’ll get your name put down.”

The doctor prodded James here and there, and said, ‘And now your feet.’

James took off his boots. Liberal applications of a strong-smelling liquid.

‘And your sore throat?

James had mentioned his sore throat to no one hut the Colonel.

‘It’s not too good.’

‘Let’s take a look … yes, I see. It’s the dust. But now the rains have come, it’ll clear up.’

And how did he know? All the personnel, from the Colonel down, were new to India. All were dismayed by it. ‘You’ll acclimatise,’ said this young man, who had read in his textbooks that one did.

The rain stopped. A clean and well-sponged sun appeared.

Hundreds of young men marched and drilled, drilled and marched, the sweat running under the khaki while the sergeants shouted at them that they had gone soft and useless, but don’t worry, we’ll see to that.

James was sent that day to Supplies to get a Second Lieutenant’s uniform, spent time on new boots, and then was in a hut with one other Second Lieutenant, Jack Reeves, who was fitting books into a shelf when he arrived - so, that boded well.

James now said to his new comrade that he had no idea how to behave as an officer.

‘Don’t fret,’ said Jack Reeves. ‘I told the corporal the same and he said, “Just repose on the bosom of your sergeant-major and he’ll see you right”.’

‘Some bosom,’ the rejoinder had to be.

And now both young men were in Administration, with fifteen others, under a Captain Hargreaves who in peacetime had been trying to beat the Slump with a chicken farm in Somerset. The war had saved him from bankruptcy. He was a rather loud, blustering sort of fellow, but competent enough. Every morning he arrived in Administration, took salutes, saluted, and then allotted tasks like someone dealing cards. They dealt with supplies of food, of uniforms, of medical supplies; with the movement of men and with transport. Admin knew everything about the camp and its dispositions, and there was in this an agreeable feeling of power, if James’s temperament had permitted. But his real life, his secret energies, went into waiting for a letter from Daphne. Almost the last thing he had said to her was, ‘You will write, won’t you? Promise.’

But had he actually given her his number? Even his full name? Had she ever called him anything but James?

The measure of his disassociation from reality was that it had taken him weeks to realise that he didn’t have her full name, and certainly not her address. He could not write to her, but she would somehow find out where he was and write. He trusted her to find a way. It had taken the ship three weeks to get from Cape Town to Bombay. Allow a week - well then, two weeks - for delays; he could expect a letter any day now.

No letter. Nothing.

So he had to write to her. But all he remembered of that four days of paradise was stumbling off the ship into Daphne’s arms -that is how it had seemed; a radiance of bliss. A wonderful spreading house on a hillside in a street of such houses, and a garden. A little verandah from where you looked down at the sea, the murdering sea, and where he had danced with her, all night, cheek to cheek. Then that little house in the bushes that smelled of salt, and the waves crashing and thundering all around them.

But no address. Not a number, not the name of the street. The women who organised the hospitality when the troopships arrived, they didn’t take account of the name of this or that soldier: they simply despatched soldiers to willing hostesses. How could he find out her surname? The base at Simonstown? Write and ask for the names of the hostesses who had been so kind when the Troopship X was in?. Careless talk costs lives. He could not put it in a letter. The censor would have it out.

What was he to do? Never mind, she would write and then there would be an address. Meanwhile he wrote long letters to her, saving them carefully, numbered and dated.

He dreamed of her with an intensity that was like an illness. What he remembered of Cape Town - and with every day the scenes he dwelt on became sharper as he polished them, relived them - was clearer to him than this ugly place full of bored young men. This camp! - what a cock-up (so the men grumbled) - even now not all the huts had been built. Some men were still in tents that had been glaring white but now were stained and brownish, where watery mud lapped around the bases and seeped in through ground sheets. Even now gangs of thin little brown men in loincloths - surely cooler at least than thick khaki? - were hoisting up sheets of roofing or running around with hods of bricks. Everything had a look of impermanence, of improvisation. Everything was difficult: food and water, and basic medicines which had to be rushed, if that was the word, by train from Delhi.

There was grumbling over the food. Curries were making their appearance, but what the men wanted was the roast beef of old England, and that made all kinds of problems. The Hindus didn’t eat beef, and their cows wandered about, skinny and pitiful but sacrosanct, and beef came from the Moslems. Water was the worst: every drop had to be boiled, or otherwise was supposed to have purification tablets, but sometimes the men forgot. There had already been an outbreak of dysentery and the little hospital was full.

In the intervals between storms of rain the dust dried, but what dust …James took up handfuls of it, sifted it between his fingers, a powder as fine as flour. ‘The spent and unconsidered earth,’ he murmured: that is where Kipling got his line, from the lifeless, fine-blowing soil of India. This soil wouldn’t be able to grow the tiniest weed, it was so spent.

He passed requisite time in the Officers’ Mess, and its rituals, he was not negligent. He was determined not to be thought an oddity.

And yet he knew he must be, because he sometimes didn’t hear when people spoke to him. He was happiest with Jack Reeves, in their hut, reading, or talking about England. Jack was homesick and said so; James was sick with love, but did not confide in his friend. No one could understand, he knew that.

No letter came from Daphne. Letters from his mother, yes, with messages from his father, heavily censored, but Daphne was silent.

In his position in Administration he learned that another troopship was arriving, not destined to discharge its load at Camp X but at Camps Y or Z; fifty men would arrive here, to replace the twenty-five taken off at Cape Town and the casualties since. There had already been funerals; the Last Post had sounded over Camp X. Some sick men would never be fit for duty and would have to wait until the end of the war to get home. As Colonel Grant had said, India took it out of you.

This camp was so charged with homesickness and longings that it could have lifted up into the air and got home to England without the benefit of ships, or even of aeroplanes - which were for the sick. So James jested with Jack: it was a fantasy that was enlivening the camp for a while.

The new arrivals off the unnamed troopship had spent three days in Cape Town: bad luck would have taken them to Durban, but it was Cape Town. James spoke to one, and then another, until he found one who had been a guest, but did not describe anything like the houses and gardens James remembered. Then at last James did, by diligent pursuit, hear that yes, he had got lucky. The man had been whisked off to a house on a hill, with a garden and …

‘What was her name?’

‘Betty, she was called Betty. And what a party, the food, the drink.’

‘And was there another woman there? A girl with fair hair?’

‘There were a lot of girls, yes. What was her name?’

‘Daphne, her name was Daphne.’

And now at last James heard: ‘Yes, I think there was. Yes. Yellow hair. But she wasn’t there much. She was pregnant. Must have popped by now.’

And no matter how James pressed and urged, that was all he could find out.

Pregnant. Nine months. It fitted. The baby was his. It had to be. Funny, he had not once thought of a baby, though now he felt ridiculous that he hadn’t. Babies resulted from lovemaking. But that was a bit of an abstract preposition. His lovemaking, with Daphne, what did it have to do with the progenitive? With baby-making? No, it had not crossed his mind. Now he could think of nothing else. Over there, across all that sea, beyond the appalling Indian Ocean, was that fair city on its hills, and there in that house was his only love with his baby.

He tried again with his informant. ‘What was the address? Where was the party?’

‘No idea. Sorry’

‘What was the fair woman’s name?’

‘I thought you said Daphne.’

‘No, her surname.’

‘No idea.’

‘Did you get the name of your hostess, the dark one, Betty?’

“I think it was Stubbs.’

‘No address?’

‘Sorry, I never thought to keep it - you know, they just drove us up there and then back again.’

‘Is she going to write to you?’

‘Who?’

‘Betty, Betty Stubbs, is she going to write you letters?’

‘No, why should she? There were dozens of us, she isn’t going to write letters to every poor sod she invited to a party;

But James was better off by one name. He had had Betty, and now he had Stubbs. Her husband was a captain at Simonstown and a friend of Daphne’s husband.

Bringing himself back from his world of dreams to reality (‘what they call reality’ - he knew how his state would be criticised, if anyone guessed it) he decided that he could not write to this husband of Daphne’s friend Betty and say, ‘Please give the enclosed to your friend and neighbour Daphne. After all, Daphne did have a husband. She had said so. But she could have had two or three husbands and they would not affect the secret life he shared with Daphne and which he knew - she must - share too. No one could have lived through that time and not for ever be changed - that he knew. But he did not wish to harm her.

He wrote: ‘Dear Captain Stubbs, I was one of the lucky men who disembarked for four days at Cape Town some months ago. I was the guest of Daphne, who lives next door to you. I would be grateful if you could drop me a line with her address. Sincerely. Second Lieutenant James Reid.’

This innocuous letter, giving nothing away - he was certain - was sent off, through the usual monitored channels. The very earliest he could expect a reply, even if everything went perfectly, was a month, let’s say six weeks.

The six weeks passed.

In the intensity of concentration of his dream James hardly noticed that the rains had stopped, the earth was parching, the heat was beating. Outside his hut someone had thrown down a mango pip which had rooted and was already a vigorous six inches of growth. So the soil of India might be unconsidered but it certainly wasn’t spent.

James sent another letter to Simonstown. After all, letters went astray, ships sank, his first letter to Simonstown had been like a paper dart with a message on it thrown into the dark.

Months passed. A letter came. It read:

Dear James,

Daphne has asked me to write. She says please don’t write again. She is very well and happy. She is having another baby, which will be born by the time you get this, I expect. So she will soon have two children. Joe is named after his father, and if it is a little girl -Daphne is sure it will be - her name will be Jill.

She sends greetings.

With our best wishes,

Betty Stubbs. Daphne Wright

Greetings! She sent greetings! James dismissed the greetings - that is not what she meant, it is what she had to say.

To his intimate memories, little pictures, the two lovely women in their flowery wrappers under a tree, Daphne in a hundred different guises, all of them smiling, he now added Daphne with a little boy, a fair pretty child, absolutely unlike the dark babies with their golden bangles on chubby wrists that he saw on their mothers’ hips, on the roads, in the shops, in doorways. When the war was over he would go to Cape Town and claim Daphne, claim his son. He knew he rejected all these pleasant Indian babies because their mothers weren’t Daphne.

War is not a continuum, but long periods of inaction and boredom interrupted by fits of intensive activity; that is to say, fighting, danger, death, and then boredom and quiescence again. So the news has always come from the fronts. ‘How was the war for you? “God, the boredom, that was the worst. “But I thought you were at Dunkirk … Borodino … in Crete … in Burma … the Siege of Mafeking?’ ‘Yes, but the bits in between, my God, the boredom, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ In Camp X boredom was like an illness, one of those diseases where a virus lays your immune system low. Boredom alleviated by a fever of rumour-mongering.

Rumours in wartime: now that’s a theme. Prognostications that have the sheen of dreams, bred of terror and loneliness and hope from unlikely places in the human mind, seethe and simmer and then spill out in words from the mouth of some careless talker in a pub or barracks, and then they fly, fly from mouth to mouth, until in no time, a day, a week, the truth is out: ‘We are being posted to Y Camp, no, to Z camp, to be nearer when the Japs attack. “They’re going to attack next week, that’s why the 9th Empire Rifles are going up there.’ ‘We are being sent to Burma - the Adjutant told Sergeant Benton. “This camp is too unhealthy, its going to be closed down and we’ll be sent to the hills .”They’ve hushed up an outbreak of cholera. Keep that under your hat or we’ll have a riot.’ ‘They’re putting sedatives in our food to keep us quiet.

Boredom and rumours.

The Japs were closer: they swarmed over Asia, but it was not James’s regiment sent to fight them. James’s regiment in Camp X, where James dreamed and had his being, was sent nowhere. Life went on, day by uncomfortable day, the hot winds blew about, saliva tasted of dust and the eyes stung and then the monsoon rain … the third. I943. The soldiers saw how Indians came running from their houses and shops and held up their arms to the rain and turned themselves about, singing. No soldiers ran from their huts to stand in the rain; it was their job to give an example, to behave properly, preserve decorum.

Colonel Grant and his lady had invited James to the odd weekend. The Colonel had taken a shine to James, whose diffidence diagnosed things thus: I suppose he likes having someone to talk to about Kipling.

A conversation had taken place. Mrs Grant said to her husband, ‘I don’t want any more of these Other Ranks. They don’t behave. Last time there was vomit all over the place.’

‘You exaggerate, my dear’

‘No. They’re not of our class, and they don’t really enjoy coming to us.’

Colonel Grant suspected this was true, but he said, ‘They’re having a thin time of it out here. We should do what we can.’

Tin putting my foot down, only officers, I’m simply not having it.’

There were hinterlands here. Long ago Colonel Grant had been a clever poor boy who got a rare scholarship to Sandhurst, which, as he progressed up the hierarchy, was proved amply justified. His had been a fine career. But he had not been of his lady wife Mildred’s class, not to start with. That is why the Grants had always invited Other Ranks. Not any longer. Mrs Grant was putting her foot down.

‘I don’t mind that boy, what’s his name, James something, he knows how to behave.’

‘He’s an officer now, my dear.’

‘Well, there you are.’

Ten young officers, James one of them, had spent a long weekend with the Grants and behaved well enough, though they, like the earlier guests, took themselves off into the town’s clubs.

James did not.

Colonel Grant said to James, while they sat companionably on the verandah, a tray of tea between them, ‘James, tell me, what is the talk in camp, about things in general?’

‘You mean, being kept here in India, doing nothing? ‘This was direct, and it was bitter, and not only on bis own account.

‘Yes, what are they saying?’

Now the Colonel must know what ‘they’ were saying, since his friend Colonel Chase heard it all, in the Officers’ Mess. Had he forgotten James was no longer with the ordinary soldiers?

‘When I was in with the men, there was a lot of grumbling. They don’t like it. But you know, the men grumble about everything.’ Yes, the Colonel did know, he hadn’t forgotten. ‘It seems to me, sir, that the men dislike officers as a matter of form … but is that what you were asking?’

What Colonel Grant was asking came from many levels and motives in him. He and Colonel Chase had sat together, talking intemperately - for them - about disaffection, and feeling that they were out of touch.

‘In the Officer’s Mess - is there bad feeling? Dangerous bad feeling?’

Since Colonel Chase heard the kind of thing said, this must be a question of interpretation: and James was startled.

‘I don’t like politics, sir, I never did.’

To say that, straight out, wasn’t something he would have done in the mess.

He had, at the beginning, said, ‘I’m not interested in politics,’ as he might have said, ‘I don’t take sugar in my tea.’

He could have said he was Conservative, or - daringly - that he intended to vote Labour, but not, that he was uninterested, any more than in the time of, let’s say, Luther’s Theses, someone might have said, I’m not interested in religion.

To be not interested in politics: that meant he was callously indifferent to the fate of humanity, at the very least misinformed. On that early evening a dozen young men set themselves to inform him. And so he had evolved some polite ways of indicating interest without committing himself.

But this explosion of interest in his lack of proper feeling had made him think back to the glorious days of I938. Now he knew that the intense political feeling of that time had not been the nation’s usual condition. Mostly left-wing feeling. There had been a boiling up of political thought, because of the Spanish Civil War, because of the Slump and the poverty, because of the threat of the coming war and so there had been all those politics, mostly left-wing. He had gone through it listening, but reading poetry.

In the Officers’ Mess most of the young men were left-wing, in various ways, but the talk was - loudly - about India. The young officers, not the older ones. The whole sub-continent was effervescing with talk of freedom, freedom from Britain, and here, in Camp X, their main task was to suppress it.

What had Colonel Chase said to Colonel Cram? He would have talked of troublemakers, Bolsheviks, even communists. About the Fifth Column, and possibly there might even have been talk of courts-martial.

‘You may not like politics, James, but I don’t imagine you can avoid them.’

James said truthfully, ‘I never think about it.’

Now the Colonel protested, in an old mans aggrieved voice, ‘Does what we’ve done here in India mean nothing to you? We’ve built all these fine railways, we’ve built roads, we’ve kept order …’ He had to stop. Order was not the word for what was happening now: agitators everywhere, the Congress, people in prison. Then, ‘Does the British Empire mean nothing to you, James?’

‘The Captains and Kings are going to have to depart, sir, that’s what I think.’

‘I see, and you don’t care.’

James might have said that if he were in Daphne’s arms the whole bloody British Empire could sink into the sea.

He said, ‘Well, sir, I don’t imagine what we think about it will make much difference to what happens.’

And now his voice was full of trouble. One reason why he didn’t like to think about politics was that if he did he had to think about the war, and that meant being engulfed in horror, an incredulous, unbelieving, protest that this war was happening at all. He knew that he dreamed about it, the enormity, the weight of it.

Colonel Grant looked sharply at the young man, whom he had been ready to convict of unfeeling. Rut no, that was not it, there was real pain there, and those blue eyes, which the Colonel thought of as English, were unhappy.

The Grants asked James and some others, one of them Second Lieutenant Jack Reeves, at the height of the hot season, for a week in the hills. They took the long slow train up into the hills and found themselves in a little cottage, that had English flowers in the garden. The winds blew cool and fresh and there was no dust. The villas and houses were called Elm Place, Wisteria Lodge, Kent Cottage, Hollyhock Close. Mrs Grant, no longer flushed with heat, though the neck of her dress showed a raddled red vee, revealed herself as an unremarkable, non-complaining hostess, but with a tendency to fuss, perhaps because she was feeling guilty. ‘James, you really must take care, I heard you coughing again last night. And you too Jack, here’s some linctus.’ The Colonel, evidently and touchingly relieved by his wife’s return to normality, could be seen looking at her with - was that actually affection? Concern? Hope?. The young observe their elders’ marriages with politeness and a secret resolve never to marry; or, if I do it won’t be to anybody like that old bag’.

The walks up here were pleasant. There was riding. James didn’t ride but the others did. Simply to sit and breathe clean air was a treat. Down in the plains, in the heat, at Camp X, they were sweating as they stood, and it was impossible to sleep. Soon, too soon, these four soldiers would be back down in it, but in the meantime …

James sat on the little verandah with a book and sometimes the Colonel sat with him. There was a wistfulness about him now that James, schooled by long observation of his father, had to recognise as regret. ‘It is a sad thing,’ the Colonel observed, more than once, ‘to have spent your life doing a job you thought was worthwhile and then you find you’re not valued.’

Colonel Grant was lonely: that was James’s discovery on this holiday. But he had a wife, didn’t he? Well, yes, he did, but … Presumably be had cronies? Now James thought of his father and knew he was lonely: he came to his father’s loneliness by way of Colonel Grant’s. Yet there were the old soldiers’ evenings in the pub, and he did come home to a wife - with whom he did not talk. What would Colonel Grant like to say, if he could, and to whom? Was his trouble only a need to grumble about not being appreciated? No, there was something deeper diere and James knew how-to respond, in his thoughts at least: after all, he could never speak to anyone about his real self. And his father: what thoughts was he holding safe, in his silences?

Even when the Colonel was not there, James was not alone. In the bungalow (‘Butler’s Lawn’) was a young English couple with a child, a little boy, just walking, or rather, staggering, with his ayah always on the watch. This little creature had taken a fancy to James, perhaps because of the young mans interest in him, and from the verandah of his house he watched James, who was standing watching him on the verandah of the next house. The ayah took to bringing the infant over, to play his new games of crawling, and sitting, clambering up and sitting, while James, tucking bis long legs well aside so as not to impede the child’s efforts, was as ready as the nanny to prevent harm. The child did not like sitting on laps, but he did like standing in front of James, legs apart, and then sitting, on his padded bottom, and laughing, and getting up, assisted by James. All this the Colonel watched and so did Mrs Grant. Not usual for a young man to bother with an infant.

‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ enquired the Colonel.

‘No, I was an only child:

‘Perhaps that accounts for it … that child really does like you -look, Mildred. ‘And Mrs Grant stood in the door, briefly, to commend the young man, who could have done without the attention. He would have liked to be alone with this little creature, roughly the same age as his child, faraway in South Africa. He wanted to persuade the little boy to sit on his knee, so he could look close into those blue bright eyes and perhaps hug him, feel the warm energetic body - hold this child and think of his own. But the ayah never let him out of her sight.

The Colonel sat with his old legs stretched out, his old hands trembling a little, a glass of whisky beside him, watching the young man and the child. His sous were grown up and were about the world, soldiers, one in danger in Burma. The Colonel was perhaps remembering his own children as attractive imps of promise, contrasting them with what they were now, as the old tend to do, when he saw this little lump of love, clutching at James’s knees as he fell back, to save himself, laughing and crowing with delight. On the Colonel’s face the tend crest smile. And on James’s face too.

‘When the war is over it will be your turn,* said the Colonel to the young man.

It is my turn already, exulted James privately, while he said, ‘Yes, sir, I hope so.’

Time passes … well, it does, one has to acknowledge that, but it does not pass evenly, and that quite apart from the everyday phenomenon of the different pace of time at three years, thirteen, thirty, sixty, ninety, which we all experience. Time moves differently in different places; in Camp X it crawled.

Colonel Grant, appealed to (tactfully) by James as to whether there would ever be a prospect of being sent somewhere more interesting, replied only that ‘They had to be always ready for trouble wherever it appears.’

‘Trouble’ was already not only evident, but increasing, even if you didn’t read the papers or listen to the wireless. ‘Troublemakers’, as the Colonel put it, were increasingly at their work, and ‘disaffection’ was everywhere like a heat rash.

Companies from Camp X were sent to ‘deal with it’. James, too, more than once. He did sympathise with the soldiers grumbling openly that they were expected to fight an enemy, not to ‘put down’ Indians. Jack Reeves, too, said he was a hit of a lied, but was even more so now he was seeing the Raj at work.

A song was being sung everywhere in Camp X, not only by the Other Ranks:

What did you do in the war, Dad?

I kept the Indians down,

Yes, we kepi the Indians down …

Complaints and grumbling at Camp X were alleviated in one way by the arrival of an Entertainment Officer - Donald Enright, now Adjutant Enright - but exacerbated in another because Donald was an open and proselytising Red.

That these hundreds of bored young men needed entertainment no one could deny.

Donald was pleased to see James, but surely not as much as deserved a year of companionship? Well, he had had acolytes since. He was now a large, assertive, extrovert voting man, full of bonhomie and goodwill. Wherever he went he was in the centre of a loud group. He moved about the camp collecting admirers like - well, like a politician.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fair enough,’ Authority agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a war on,

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

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

Glean your boots,

Check your kit,

Stand to attention,

Slant! at ease,

Mind your Q’s, mind your P’s,

There’s a bloody war on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James was quivering with the arbitrary injustice of it all.

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

James remained at attention.

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

‘Are you going with the rest, sir?’

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

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

James saluted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also gave a lecture on Modern Poetry, while Donald sat proudly listening, for he was remembering how much James was his creation. And James said so: ‘I owe you a good deal,’ be said, ‘don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.’

‘Oh, jolly good show,’ said Donald.

The end of the war in Europe, so now they could go home -but when? Oh, no, not now, don’t think it, the ships will be full for a long time yet, you must take your turn, it’s not only you, but the RAH boys from all the far-flung parts of Empire, so many impatient young men, not enough ships, wait, wait, you’ve stuck it out for nearly four years, haven’t you? Just be patient a bit longer.

Not all could, or did. In two other camps, where they had been told they would be kept here, in India, to ‘maintain order’ to ‘contain unrest’ to ‘combat sedition’ to ‘preserve the British Empire’, disaffection broke out. ‘We didn’t join up to do the dirty work of the British Empire. “We joined up to fight Hitler. “You were called up and you will do as you are told.’

Speeches, real riots, and the camps were a-boil.

A couple of soldiers, ‘hot heads’, ‘incendiaries’, were court-martialled, but the Authority had listened, had taken heed. In Parliament at Home, questions were asked and speeches being made. And so the soldiers were going home.

Some, who remembered the bad time they had bad on the ship coming to India did not look forward to the sea voyage home. But this time it would not be around the Cape, the long, long journey, but through the Suez Canal.

But James had dreamed of making landfall at the Cape (though luck might just as well have taken him to Durban), and finding Daphne and his son and … there his thoughts became hazy. Yes, of course she had a husband, but she loved him, James, and there was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? The main thing, what he had to hold on to, was his child. His son - there could be no doubt about it, a love child, there could never have been more of a child of love than his and Daphne’s. Jimmy Reid, now four years old.

Hundreds of young men who had seen no more of India and the Indians than what they observed of life on the roads, in the bazaars, or the networks of amenities that surrounded the army - servants, Eurasian girls who were spoken of by the sahibs and memsahibs as if they were so much dirt, or the Indian soldiers in the army who intermeshed hardly at all with the white army, or the cleaners at the camp - these young men left India without regrets, at best thinking that the war had given them a glimpse of what travel might be. They filed on to the ship that was to take them away from a continent they saw as thoroughly unwholesome and unsavoury. But this voyage could not be as terrible as that other; only half the length, and they were going home. Home, which shortened the distance. It was rough, and hot, particularly through the Suez Canal, and in the Bay of Biscay, as was to be expected, the waves chopped and churned and tossed them about and they were sick, but home was in sight - and there they were, at last, the white cliffs, as Vera Lynn had promised.

‘How was your voyage?’ asked his mother, and James, ‘Oh, not so bad, could have been worse.’

On a dirty and rattling train James travelled through a land without light, so it seemed, a thin drizzly dark and faint blurs of light, and then in his home town, the street lights were dim and the windows, if not blacked out, showed parsimonious glimmers, and he was watching his feet as he walked. When he switched on the light on the stairs his mother said, ‘Please, only when you have to,’ and on the landing a faded notice said, ‘Save Electricity - Don’t Switch It On’, His old room, where he dropped his kitbag unopened, to get down faster to his parents, was small, well, it always had been, but it was so dingy. The supper was in the kitchen because leaving the oven door open heated the room; once his mother had made a point of eating ‘properly’ in the dining-room. The three sat around the table which had a vase of autumn leaves on it, and Mrs Reid boasted that she had got ‘under the counter’ liver from the butcher, in honour of his coming home. She served three thin lengths of brown meat like leather straps, with onions and potatoes. James had told himself, having grown up, that his father was not an old man, but though he was not much over fifty Bill Reid was an old man now, with a fuzz of white hair around a red face. James’s mother was polite to him and smiled all the time. Her embrace when he arrived seemed embarrassed rather than warm. ‘You have filled out,’ she said. But she could not stop smiling and tried to blink away tears when he noticed them. His father, silent as ever, kept pushing the dishes of vegetables at him, nodding Help yourself, but while his eyes were moist too, he could not talk, even say, ‘Thank God you’re home,’ so the dishes of vegetables had to do instead. ‘Have some potatoes,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘At least we’ve got plenty of those.’ In the dim kitchen the three sat eating and smiling, and felt so powerfully for themselves and for each other that it was a relief when James said he was tired. I le left his mother sitting under the light, the radio switched on, crocheting something, and his father went to the pub.

‘He’s got to tell his mates you are home,’ she said.

James stood at his bedroom window and looked down at the darkened town. In India lights glared and blared, shadows moved blackly as the sun did, defining the hours. He had returned to a lightless land.

He at once got a job at the Town Hall, but not starting at the bottom, because of his years administrating Camp X. It was a good job. He stayed in his room a lot, reading, ate the meals that were less even than the meagreness he had been brought up with: rationing suited his mother’s nature; she enjoyed eking out the bacon ration and making the meat ration stretch. The drear and dark of post-war England - well, he was home, and that was all that mattered. He thought of India and did not like his memories. Except for Jack Reeves, with whom he had exchanged addresses, and Donald, and Colonel Grant - and of course, the little child of those two visits - he did not care to remember India, which was not so much a place as an emotion of holding on, sticking it out.

Alone in his room, the door locked, he read his letters to Daphne. It took hours. He did not see how he could send them: suppose they were intercepted? Suppose her husband … no, he would give them to her himself. When’ Just as soon as the war’s enormous damage had been absorbed and everything had settled down.

He met Donald, who was already well up the ladder that would take him into politics. He visited Jack Reeves, and Jack came to him fora weekend. He joined a club and played some modest and likeable cricket. And he married Helen Gage, who had been a landgirl and enjoyed it: he could see, when he told her how he had longed for the end of the war, she did not understand, though she said she had too. She was a pretty, healthy young woman, tough and strong after her years of hard labour, and his mother was delighted. She had been afraid he would not marry, or marry late, she had not known why, but that had been her secret dread. She had been afraid of another silent man thrown out by war, a man who could not speak of what he had known. James was not communicative: he did not have much to say about India. But in the ordinary affairs of life he was easy enough - normal. His wife would not have to wake in the night beside a man thrashing about in a nightmare.

He told Helen that he had had a fling in Cape Town and that a child had resulted. She was married. When travelling was easier, lie was going out to see. In fact, he had gone up to London to ask about travelling within a week of getting home. There wouldn’t be air travel for ordinary people for some time, or only for people who could pull strings: did he have strings to pull? No, so he would have to wait. It was not only the soldiers and airmen who were still coming home as the ships became available but everybody was on the move or wanted to be, after years of being stuck because of the war, or because of new jobs abroad. He could reckon on a good wait. Months, no: years, more like it.

It had already been years. He had learned how to wait. Love like theirs would keep, existing as it did out of time. There would be Daphne’s white arms welcoming him and the years in between would be forgotten.

Helen asked him how old his love child would be by now. Generous of her to use the word, and he kissed her for it, before telling her the exact age: years, months, days, Helen had had no cause until now for so much as a moment’s doubt: this was her first shock and it was a bad one. She had touched something deep and dangerous, and she knew it: this was like one of those doors you carelessly open in a dream and find a house, a world, a landscape, wider, larger, brighter or darker than the one you know. Almost, she broke off the engagement then and there. His face as he told her was one she had not seen before, set, inward-looking, into a world she was not going to share. This moment put in high relief other feelings she had bad about James, not easily articulated. She did not try now. She thought, But I’ve got him, haven’t I? She hasn’t. He says he loves me. And she certainly was very fond of him. She had had her adventures too. Wartime is productive of ‘flings’, not to mention broken hearts. Her heart had not been broken, or anything like it, but one of the men she had loved, if briefly, had been killed in Normandy She knew she had got over it, but while she confessed to James, she broke down, much to her surprise, and wept, finding herself enclosed in his arms. She was weeping not so much for a man but for lost men, her lover, her brother (lost at sea), a cousin (at Tobruk), and then there was a friend, a fireman, killed in the Blitz - unlived lives.

He comforted her, she him, but she knew that something was biting at his heart she was not going to know about. How old? ‘Nearly six - five years, eleven months, ten days.’

A wedding, restricted by post-war shortages.

They did everything right. Every Sunday they went to lunch with James’s parents, and they visited her parents, who lived far away, in Scotland, for holidays. They had a child, a girl, named Deirdre, because of James Stephens’ poem about the Irish queen. Helen liked this poem but joked that it was asking a lot for their little girl to be as beautiful as that. But Deirdre was pretty enough.

Eight years after the war ended James told Helen he was going to South Africa, He could have gone before, but that would have meant a ship, and he would never set foot on a ship again - never. It had to be the air, and when they could afford it. She knew there was no point in minding. He never mentioned Ins other child unless she asked, but then he promptly told her, ‘He is seven years, three months, ten days,’ or whatever it was. Sometimes she checked just to see if that invisible calendar was still running there, in him, marking . , . but she did not know what. This was not merely a question of a child’s exact age.

James’s plane descended at Khartoum, Lake Victoria, Johannesburg, with leisurely time at each for refuelling, restocking. This cumbersome trip seemed to him miraculous, when he remembered that other voyage. Then Cape Town, spread out over its hills, surrounded by sea. He found a modest hotel from where he could look down at the sea, the now innocent sea, full of ships, one being a passenger liner sparkling with new paint. Then he put a thick paper parcel under his arm and walked up through streets he remembered not at all to what he did remember, the two ample houses side by side in a street of gardened houses. On the gate where there should have been the name Wright, was the unknown Williams. The gate post for next door was still Stubbs. I le retreated across the street to stand under an oak, and he looked for a long time at Daphne’s house, which in his memory lived as zones of intensity, the little room he had been given, Daphne’s bedroom, and the stoep, all else being dark. On to the verandah - the stoep - came an old woman, with a book. She sat in a grass chair, put on dark glasses, and gazed down at the sea. There was no sign of other life. Then he as carefully examined Betty’s house, of which he remembered only the garden. He could see movement through the windows that opened off the verandah. A maid? A black woman with a white headscarf. But he couldn’t see her properly He moved across the street, cautiously pushed open the gate, and stood under the tree which he remembered spreading over trestles, full of food and drink, and a crush of people - soldiers. The companion tree in the other garden would live in his mind for ever because of the two beautiful young women, one dark, one fair, standing in grass, under it, wearing flowery wrappers.

Someone had come on to the Stubbs’s verandah. A tall woman. She shaded her eyes to peer at him and came slowly down the steps towards him. He did not know her. She stopped a few paces off, let her hand fall, and looked forward to have a good look. Then she straightened and stood, arms loose by her side, in a pose it did seem he remembered. A tall thin woman. She wore a short well-fitting blue and yellow dress in small geometrical patterns, with a narrow gold-edged belt, and some little gold beads. Her face was thin and sunburned and her dark hair was waved in neat ridges. On one thin wrist hung a gold bangle. Yes, now he knew - it was the bangle -this was Betty. She spoke: ‘What are you doing here?’

This question seemed to him so absurd he only smiled. He thought that the stern face - she was like a headmistress, or the manager of something - almost smiled in response, but then she frowned.

‘James - it is James? - then you must go away.’

‘Where is Daphne?’

At this there was a pause, and then a quick expulsion of breath - the sigh of someone who has been holding it. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

She came a step closer. He was thinking, already afflicted with anguish, that this tall dry uncharming woman had been that lovely creature he remembered as all dark flowing hair and loose soft gowns.

‘I must see Daphne.’

‘I told you, she’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She doesn’t live here now.’

‘I can see that. It’s on the gate. Is she in Cape Town?’

A tiny hesitation. ‘No.’

So, she was lying. ‘I could find out where she lives/This was not a threat, but a reminder to himself that he was not dependent on her for information.

She was agitated now, she actually raised those brown thin forearms, pressing the long dry hands to her chest. ‘James,’ she said, urgent, appealing, afraid. ‘You mustn’t do this. Why are you doing this? Do you want to ruin her life? Do you want to break up her marriage? She has three children now.’

‘One of them is mine.’

She did not seem inclined to dispute it. ‘You just turn up like this, turn up, as if it’s nothing, you just arrive and …’

‘I want to see my son. He’s going to have a birthday, his twelfth birthday’ And he recited his son’s exact age, years, months, days.

She closed her eyes. Her lids were white against the tan of her face. She was breathing deep: she was shocked. He waited until she opened them. Betty had deep brown eyes, he remembered, brown kind eyes in a smiling lightly tanned face: he had thought of her as ‘a nut brown maid’. Well, there were the eyes, and there were tears in them. Not unkind, no, they were still kind.

‘James, do you want to ruin Daphne’s life?’

‘No. I love her.’

‘That’s what you’ll do if you go on with this.’

‘I want my son.’

‘But you must see …’ She stopped. That sigh again, almost a gasp. Oh, yes, she was frightened all right. But she was on guard, fighting: she was protecting her friend.

‘Do you still see her?’

‘Of course. She’s my best pal.’

He produced his great lump of parcel: the letters. He held it out.

‘What is that?’

‘My letters. I’ve written to her, you see. I’ve always written to her. In the war there was the censorship. Then I didn’t want to cause trouble. So I brought them.’

She didn’t take them from him.

He stood obdurately there, holding out the parcel: the force of his demand caused her hand to come towards it. She hesitated, then took it. ‘Will you give them to her?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you promise?’

They stared at each other, then her gaze lowered to the parcel.

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘My son,’ he urged. ‘It’s my son. I think of him … yes, all the time. Perhaps he will come and visit us in England?’

‘You’re mad. Yes, you’re mad. Yes, you are.’

But she held the parcel against her chest.

‘You’ve promised,’ he said.

She backed a couple of steps, then turned and ran for it, but over her shoulder she said, ‘Wait, just wait there.’

He waited. He did not look at all at the verandah where the old woman now read her book, the dark glasses pushed up to her forehead.

After a good twenty minutes, the maid emerged from inside the house, white apron, white headscarf, a worried face. She stopped in front of him and held out a large envelope. There she stood while he tore open the envelope. She was peering to see what she could. From inside the house came a voice from the invisible Betty. ‘Evelyn, Evelyn, I want you.’

Taking her time, her eyes never leaving the envelope, the maid turned and went off, sending back slow thoughtful looks over her shoulder.

Inside the envelope was a sheet of writing paper and scrawled on it, ‘Please, please, go away. Go away now. Please. Don’t hurt her. This is your boy’

A photograph, a decent size for a casual snap, of a boy of about eight, standing by himself, legs apart, smiling. This picture was like one of himself, James, at about the same age. Black and white of course, so you couldn’t see what colour his eyes were. But if the rest was like James, then why not the eyes? And Daphne had blue eyes.

lie took his time putting the photograph back, and then the sheet of paper. He stood smartly to attention and saluted the invisible Betty, who was watching him, he knew. He went off down the street, slowly, keeping in the shadows from the trees, as he had learned to do in India where the heat struck and burned, was not kindly, as it was here.

It was late morning, a fine Cape day, and over the famous mountain thin loose cloud lay, white and shiny. The famous tablecloth. Down he went, sending distracted looks to the sea shimmering peaceably there. He walked clumsily, people were staring. He sat on a bench in some public place but then got up and walked on, found another, sat down, pulled out the photograph and looked at it, for a long time.

He could not stay still. He began aimless fast walking, and found himself in some kind of market, where under trees long trestles were laden with every kind of dried fruit: peaches, apricots, pears, plums, apples, yards and yards of them, every trestle with its attendant woman, who was black or brown, at least, not white. Fruit pale yellow burnt umber, purple, black; fruit red and pale brown and gold and rosy and green. Some was crystallised, colours glowing though a frosty white crust. A vision of plenty He picked up a greengage, put it in his mouth, heard a shout from the vendor, realised he had to buy, and bought a couple of pounds of mixed crystallised fruit. ‘Helen will like this,’ he thought.

Off he walked, went up streets and down them. They were full of people, but he did not see them. lie sat on benches and looked at the photograph of the boy who might just as well be himself, at that age, put back the photograph, walked on. His feet had the devil in them, he could not keep still. Dusk came. He was in streets that smelled spicy and hot: it was the Malay quarter, but Cape Town in his mind did not define itself in areas, it was a spreading smiling city, a Cape of Good Hope, radiating welcome, like the stamps he had as a child. He saw a stall, bought a sticky bun, ate it, standing up, while the Coloured man told him he had to pay for it. Oh, yes, that must be Afrikaans, he supposed, and gave the man a fistful of money. Then it was dark and he was in a public garden and he saw a bench and at once fell on it and bent sideways in a tight clench of his whole body. Pain had finally overcome him. He was afraid of crying out, and of people coming, so he stayed not moving, aching all over because of the tension of his position.

He was thinking of Betty, in her unlikable smart matron’s dress. That scene was already in the past, gone, and if he did not choose to remember it, it was non-existent. Why was that realer than the one he loved to see in his mind’s eye, the two beautiful women under the tree? Because it was more recent? Both were bright scenes, whose every detail he could recall: one of them, to him, was the truth. And he was thinking of Daphne, somewhere in this city, perhaps not more than five minutes’ walk away. Yet nothing and no one could be more distant. Nearer to him were his memories of life.

He became aware that someone else was on the bench. He did not look up.

She, however, was looking at him: Annette Rogers, who had finished her shift at the Fair view Hotel, a good hotel, and was interrupting her progress home as she did every evening on this bench. Her situation at home was to say the least unsatisfactory, and before she could face it, she needed to strengthen herself. This man here, was he ill? His face was white, his lips pale, from compression, his eyes were closed, and everything about him was tense and awkward. ‘He must be stiff in that position,’ she thought, and leaned forward and said, ‘Hey, excuse me, I don’t want to butt in, but are you ill?’

He shook his head, not opening his eyes.

She moved closer and lifted his tense hand which went limp in hers. It was cold. It was a fine warm evening. She continued to hold his hand, trying to take his pulse without his noticing. But he did notice and said, ‘I’m all right.’

All right he evidently was not.

Unhappiness was something she was used to: you could say she had a talent for it. She began examining him for clues. His clothes were good: now, that was a really smart jacket, it must have cost a bit. His trousers were of fine cloth. His shirt - no, he wasn’t short of enough for a meal. But his face, it was simply awful, perhaps it was a death, if it wasn’t money … she moved closer and put her hand on his shoulder. Then something about him licensed her to put her other arm under his head. She was cradling him, hardly knowing how it happened. She was now getting anxious on her own account. Her jealous husband - suppose he chanced to come by and see her holding another man: she could count on a few bruises to pay for that. But she continued to cuddle this unknown man, and said, ‘Hey, listen, don’t let yourself go like this, it only makes it worse.’

He opened his eyes: blue, a strong blue even in this dusking light.

He said, ‘You see, I’m not living my own life. It’s not my real life. I shouldn’t be living the way I do.’

This complaint may be made, or thought, by all kinds of people; demands on Fate, or on God, that are everything from the reasonable to the preposterous; (‘Oh, I wish I’d never been born! “I wish I’d been an aristocrat in the eighteenth century’ ‘I wish I hadn’t been born a cripple.’) but the most frequently heard is the one instantly recognised by Annette Rogers. It made perfect sense to her. Her life certainly wouldn’t include a violent husband, a senile mother, and two out-of-control teenage children. Her life - but she had several variants of tier dream - her favourite life was a little house right on the edge of the sea, like those you could see if you took a trip out of Cape Town, and she would live there with a man whose features she did not specify, though she knew he was kind. A kind man, and they would live there quietly, in good humour, and eat fish, grow vegetables and have fruit trees.

‘To know you’re living the wrong life, not your own life, that is a terrible thing.’ And now he began to weep, dry sobs, while she sat holding him together. She had to get herself back home, she had to, otherwise she was going to catch it, oh, yes, she could count on that. But she did not desert her post.

Annette was a tall stout woman, with dry fair hair in a roll on her neck - Betty Grable; her husband ordered her to keep it like that. She wore sensible shoes, which she needed for work, managing a whole floor of the Fairview, which kept her on her feet all day.

Now she hauled up this man, using strength, because he was stiff from sitting in that twisted pose. She put her hand into his arm and steered him through bright cheerful streets to his hotel, The Seaview. Surely he could do better than that, with those clothes!

He had left his parcel of fruits behind on the bench, which would be found later by a tramp.

She stood with him while he composed himself, and pushed the door open and stepped into a poorly lit and dingy lobby. She approved of his self-command, which was taking him to the desk for his key, and up iron stairs which would not have been out of place in a warehouse. She knew he would not turn and smile, or indicate he knew she was there: he was too deep inside, dealing with whatever it was that was eating him. ‘I’d give a good bit to know what’s eating him, but I never will!’ She caught a last glimpse of a wretched face.

And she went home, two hours late.

As for him he had no picture in his mind of the kind unknown who had, so he felt, held him together. His memory of Annette Rogers was of arms holding him: the haven of an embrace.

James and Helen continued their exemplary life. He was now in charge of a department at the Town Hall, and the well-being of a good many of his fellow citizens depended on him. She was prominent in all kinds of local charities. He played cricket. She taught gym and modern dance. They were members of a Ramblers Club and went for long hikes with their daughter, who was doing well at school.

James’s father died. His mother at once turned off the radio, put her knitting and crochet into a drawer and let her house. She took trips all over the British Isles and then to Europe, With a group of merry widows, she went on long sea cruises or to exotic isles, by plane, sending postcards back to James and Helen. He had a carton full of them.

Not a letter came to their house without his quick glance at it. Helen knew what he was waiting for. She let him know she understood. He tried to be first at any telephone call. He had shown her the photograph of the boy who was as real to her as the ones she had seen of her husband, as a boy.

There was another trip to Cape Town and she said she would go with him. He did not demur.

Deirdre had changed, it seemed overnight, from a friendly and sensible girl into a vindictive, spiteful, cruel creature they did not recognise. ‘Hormones,’ murmured Helen. ‘Oh, dear!’ Deirdre was invited to go with them to Cape Town and said she would rather die. ‘I want you out of my life,’ she shouted, in one of the formulas of I960s’ teenage rebellion. ‘I’m going to live with my friend Mary.’ Judging that this stage might have passed by the time they returned, James and Helen set off without her, relieved.

By now the planes flew to Salisbury, then Johannesburg; the two glamorous stops in between had gone.

In Cape Town they were in a good hotel: James insisted on one high enough for a view of the sea.

Helen was enchanted by the Cape, for who is not? They drove up the coast, the incomparable coast, they visited gardens, and climbed Table Mountain and drove about through vineyards. James took her where he was pretty sure he remembered trestles full of fruit of all kinds, of all colours, but could not find it: stern hygiene had intervened.

She saw how he looked carefully at every face, in gardens, in the hotel, in streets; and she did too, she was looking for a younger version of James. He would be a young man now, a very young man, like the photographs of James, in uniform.

Day after day: and then James said they should go to the university. It was term time. And they walked about everywhere, looking at every youngster who passed: Jimmy Reid, James the younger, walking towards them, or in a group, or with a girl. That was one day and then James wanted to go again, for another. After that, it would be time to leave Cape Town.

Helen said to him, ‘Look, James, you mustn’t give up. One day there’ll be a letter, or a telephone call, or we’ll open the door and there he’ll be.’

He smiled. She didn’t know of that thick pack of letters. He was certain Betty would have kept her promise: she had promised. Daphne would have read those letters to her which contained the best of himself, his essence, his reality, ‘what I really am’. She must have read them. But if she had told her son, their son, then by now there would have arrived that letter, been that phone call, the ring at the door. He was twenty. Twenty and so many months and days. If he knew, he was old enough to make up his own mind.

‘You’ll see,’ said Helen. ‘It’ll happen one of these days,’

They were lying in bed, and she knew what he was thinking, because he was staring, as he so often did, into the empty dark.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him, in gratitude for her kindness, her loyalty to him, her love. But he was thinking, a deep, secret, cruel thought: ‘If you want to call that love.’

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