farmer. He actually managed a few hours’ lovemaking with a farmer’s daughter who was sighing with remorse all the time because her fiance was in North Africa, fighting. ‘I love him, I do!’ The harvest ended. Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked the States. Things were looking up, so the pundits said, though one could be excused for thinking they were at their worst.
‘You’re being saved for the best,’ jested the sergeants, more matey now, perhaps because they were as bored as their charges. James spent any spare hour on his bed reading. He read the books Donald had given him, the usual mix of poetry and real literature with pamphlets. ‘The Second Front - No “Let India Go” - through these he merely leafed, feeling guilty, his mind freezing with boredom, but listening to Walten our two souls have left this mortal clay, And seeking mine, you think that mine is lost - Look for me first in that Elysiatt glade …
Beautiful, bleak Northumberland: perhaps this would be their final resting place, perhaps they would die here forgotten by humanity and the War Office. Why should they ever leave it, if they hadn’t yet? Such are the slowed mad thoughts of people who have had to be patient too long.
And then, for no apparent reason, it was over. They all believed they were oft” to yet another camp, because of the law that what is seems as if it must always be. Their regiment had been forgotten. ‘Someone had blundered,’ is the soldier’s perennial thought.
But no, they were going to India. Not that they were told it was India: careless talk costs lives, but they could figure it out. The Japs were coming closer to India, and the Indian army was set to fight them. Anything, anywhere, just get us out of this place, waiting, drilling for hours every day to keep fit.
James put his things in his kitbag, with his precious books of poetry. He knew that if he hadn’t had poetry and books during the last months - no, years, now - he would have found himself in the bin. And he had Donald to thank for it, thank for everything. That summer, just before the war, it shone there in his memory, as strong a dream as his dreams for a future of love and peace, peace and love. He thought, ‘After the war, it will be like that.’ Meaning, like the happy months of summer schools, friendly debates, a bitter argument, the frank and fair exchange, all hope and excitement and promise. What was this war for, if not to create that, a world of generous friendship and comradeship and generous girls, among whom would be his girl, the one girl.
He went to say goodbye to his parents. His father asked if he had had the chance of being an officer, and he replied yes, but he hadn’t wanted it. ‘Then more fool, you,’ said his father. His mother, weeping, told him to take care of himself.
The great ship in its camouflage dress, designed to make it look from a distance like a blur or a cloud or perhaps a school of flying fishes, at any rate something ephemeral, now seemed solid, sinister, even furtive, standing there in the dock, and those who had known it as a luxury ship of the famous Union-Castle Line, in peacetime always decked in bright holiday colours, would not now have owned it. ‘That the Bristol Castle*.’
Five thousand soldiers, with their attendant officers crammed the dockside and backed up into the surrounding streets, waiting to board. Of these it is safe to say the majority had scarcely seen the sea, except perhaps for a day’s outing (the Thirties did not run much to holidays for the poor) nor had they seen ships and shipping. Luxury ships had not occupied their imaginations as even remote possibilities for themselves, seen only on newsreels or as headlines in newspapers. ‘The Queen Mary arrived in New York this morning, bauds playing to welcome the Duke of…’ a film star … an opera singer … a boxer.
Five thousand soldiers and their officers would fit into a space designed for 780 passengers and crew, and they were embarking on a seven-thousand-mile journey to Cape Town and then on, thousands of miles, to - where else? - India.
The Bristol Castle had no name now just as their destinations had none.
She stood in her tiers, or decks, a neat symbol of the society they were defending, the two top layers, the best, where their officers would go, with the ship’s officers, then down, down, down, deck after deck, until a mass of soldiers would fill the worst parts of the ship. Just like the world, if it comes to that - to be tedious.
Up the gangways they stepped, while their sergeants and corporals stood above, watching, barking directions, which they had been given by the ship’s officers, for they knew as little about the geography of a ship as their charges.
James Reid was at the tail end of the embarking, with his platoon, their corporal beside them, as dismayed as they were. Corporal ‘Nobby’ Clark (soldiers called Clark are always Nobby), eyes on the watch for error, a fleshy man often in a perspiration with anxiety, was one of those who find organisation difficult, and have to overdo it. His men put up with him: they had had plenty of time for patience in those months and months of waiting. Beside James was Rupert Fitch, a farmer’s son from Kent. He was a lean flat-bodied young man, a horseman, with bold fine features, lightly freckled, and pale hair already receding from a high forehead. James, still dreaming sometimes of perhaps finding himself (how?) a farmer, felt towards Rupert something of the wistful admiration that Paul Bryant had felt for himself, and he, long ago (three years), for Donald. Rupert Fitch never had to be told the why or how of anything: it was as if the army was an extension of his young life planting and reaping. ‘Permission to speak, Corporal,’ he would say to a corporal or a sergeant as an equal, familiar - at ease. ‘Wouldn’t it be better, Sergeant, if we …’ took that direction, instead of the one ordered; suggested to Supplies that such and such a dubbin - for boots - would be better than what they had. Certainly officer material, but like James, he had refused. ‘Not my style,’ he had said. On the farm he had mucked in with the men, and that was what he liked.
A tall stooping dark youth, with hot defensive eyes and a way of clenching his fists like a boxer expecting attack, was Harold Murray, who worked in his father’s shop, selling men’s cut-price clothes. Johnnie Payne sold vegetables with his father from a stall in Bermondsey. He had been taking lessons from James in bookkeeping, which would come in useful after the war. These five men knew each other well, but the other five of B Platoon were new, moved in some reshuffle ordained from above that the soldiers could see no reason for.
Corporal Clark at last shouted the order to march, to his platoon, and on to the ship they went, low down, E Deck, just above the water line. Then down a ladder, and they were in their quarters, a space that had a table wedged between bulkheads, and a cupboard with china, and another where their hammocks were. The space not filled with the table accommodated the ten of them standing up with a few inches between them, as it would when they would be lying down horizontal in their hammocks. Their gear piled up against a wall seemed to take half of what room there was. ‘Up on deck’ came the order, and B Platoon, with hundreds, thousands of men, watched England slide away, white cliffs and all, while the gulls squawked around the ship. Waves were already sending up spray. The light was going. An obscured sunset stained a brownish sky red. On E Deck a minute flicker of light showed the steps going down. And down they went again, into stuffy darkness smelling of paint and new wood. Dark. In peacetime this ship blazed light as it moved, gilding and silvering the sea. Once these ships had taken a month for a voyage, but the time shortened to three weeks, and then the aim of two weeks was in sight - but why not dawdle, take your time, in a ship designed for pleasure? Now no light was supposed to show, the ship was blacked out, like the homes in England, like England, and down in their quarters B Platoon took in the fact that there was a single dull yellow bulb.
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
