steps and not stockinged feet. It was the regimental bugler, and I braced myself for the bloody racket.
The first thing I did was check the notice-board in the dining hall. I was due ‘on the ship’ for my interview with Colonel Aubrey Butterfield, commanding officer of the battalion, directly after dismiss on the square (which was one of the quays of the dock). I would be marched over there by our section commander, Corporal Prendergast, who was in fact Oamer, the easy-going, pipe-smoking number two of the York booking office.
I went to the washrooms for a sluice-down.
All the taps were taken up, mostly with men shaving as best they could under the cold running water. The drill was that you stood behind a man shaving and waited your turn, but the man ahead of me was more boy than man, and so was not shaving but only washing. It was William, the York station runner – surname Harvey, as I had now discovered – and he made Alfred Tinsley, the eighteen-year-old would-be engine driver, look like a veteran. Both were slightly built, and more boys than men, and both had lied about their age when enlisting, but Harvey had lied more, since he’d barely turned seventeen when he walked into the recruitment office. William Harvey looked the part of the young hero as well, with his blue eyes and blond curls, whereas Tinsley was a gawky individual with a face and body he’d not yet grown into. Just then William was talking to his neighbour, who I didn’t know.
‘The Germans are frightened to death – ’ he said, before flattening his curls under the icy water, ‘ – at the sight of a bloody bullet,’ he added, coming up with a gasp. He left off washing, turned to me with a grin, and stepped aside.
‘Lovely day for it, eh… Mr Stringer?’ he said, towelling his hair.
‘For what, son?’ I said, setting about my chin with a none-too-sharp razor. ‘And call me Jim.’
‘The big march,’ he said.
‘I’d forgotten about that.’
The battalion, we had been informed, had secured the use of a very spacious field about four miles off, and we would be marching there for sporting activities. Young William was all in favour of it, red hot with excitement at the thought, he was.
The kid had moved off, and I saw that someone else had come into the position behind me, waiting for the tap… and it was that creeping Jesus Oliver Butler himself. When I’d finished shaving, I turned to him, and said, ‘It’s all yours, mate,’ at which Butler shook his head, saying, ‘I’ve already shaved.’ ‘Then get the fuck out of it,’ I wanted to say, but Butler said, ‘I think we’d better have a word about my brothers… I could see you getting mad at them last night. I bet you’d have liked to come over and lay ’em out.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.
‘Or maybe you didn’t fancy your chances? See, Jim, you might think they’re a pair of simpletons, but what do you think the real business is going to be for us when we get over there in bloody France? Do you think we’re going in with the infantry, Jim? Perhaps you think we’re going to be building railways?’
‘Could you just get to the point?’
‘Right, Jim. Well, the empire is at the crisis of her fate, and she needs some blokes to shovel shit. Have you been down to the QM stores and had a look? There’s eleven hundred shovels there, Jim.’
‘We’re to get rifles as well, you know.’
‘Your most important bit of kit is going to be your shovel and the question is: can you use it? Can you dig an earth rampart, Jim? Can you dig a fucking
I shook his hand – well, it seemed the quickest way of getting shot of him – and he moved off to his breakfast.
I went through to the hall myself a few minutes later. The place was vast, lines stretching to infinity of men sitting on plain forms at long deal tables. At every place was a white plate with a hunk of bread and bacon on it. Trolleys on which sat giant tea urns were wheeled by squads of orderlies, and I did not like to see their thin white suits, because they put me in mind of hospitals. We ordinary soldiers wore civilian clothes: dark trousers and tunic shirts with braces hanging down. We didn’t have uniforms yet, only boots and caps – and there were only two sizes of caps: large and small, whereas most of the blokes, of course, were medium-sized. The officers did have uniforms, and there were plenty of that lot strolling about, for they’d breakfasted earlier, on their boat. I saw our platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Quinn, late of the North Eastern Railway Engineers’ Drawing Office at York. ‘Unfortunately…’ he was saying to a fellow officer. He was a good-looking chap, was Quinn, with a square face, sad brown eyes and a mournful way of talking. He’d been to St Peter’s School, York: the Eton of the bloody North.
In spite of the officers, the dining hall was in uproar. ‘You fellows, you’re always bloody grousing!’ I heard; and someone near me called out, ‘Wang it over, mate!’ at which an empty cup went soaring over my head. I saw young William Harvey. He’d already finished his breakfast: ‘Set me up just nicely, that has!’ he was saying to someone. A few places along from him were constables – now fusiliers – Scholes and Flower. They were talking together, as usual, being about as thick with each other as the weird Butler twins.
I walked further, and saw a place next to Tinsley, the young train watcher. I made to push on, since I knew he’d shoot some railway question at me the moment I sat down. But Tinsley looked up and saw me, and perhaps knew what I was about, so I took the place next to him. He weighed straight in as I set about my bacon and bread: ‘Why did you not continue on the footplate, Mr Stringer?’
‘Well, there’s more money in the police,’ I said, ‘and you keep a clean collar.’
‘But even so,’ said Tinsley.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell the tale. He evidently felt the high-speed life of the engine man to be in every way superior to that of the plodding copper. Without waiting for my answer, Tinsley started in about an engine driver he knew in the York South Shed, who put up ‘the hardest running of any man on the North Eastern Railway’. As he rabbited on, a new bloke sat down over opposite.
It was Dawson, the cockney porter, and he nodded at me, which was a turn-up.
‘Going on all right?’ I said, a bit guardedly.
‘Top hole,’ he said. ‘All right, son?’ he added, nodding at young Tinsley.
I introduced the two of them, but Dawson, being only a porter, hardly existed as far as young Tinsley was concerned. There were all kinds of snobs, and Tinsley was a railway snob.
When not drunk, I realised, Dawson was a different proposition, even looked different. His scrubby little moustache was more of an amusing error rather than anything, and the crumples of his face all added up to good humour. I couldn’t believe this was the same man as had been rated by the Chief in the Bootham Hotel.
‘The Chief talked you into enlisting then?’ I said.
‘What?’ said Dawson, examining his bacon. He looked up. ‘Fact is, I’d been asking myself… Am I more use to the country scrounging for tips in York station or getting killed in France?’ He took a belt of his tea. ‘Crikey,’ he said, and all his face crumples became evident. He was squinting down into his cup. ‘Talk about stewed,’ he said.
‘Mine’s practically water,’ I said.
‘That right?… Versatile, these army cooks.’
He was looking all around the hall, taking it all in.
Someone called out, ‘Silence for the sergeant major!’
A bloke stood on a form at the end of the hall, and announced that, after the after-breakfast parade, there’d be a five-mile route march for the whole company.
‘Nice,’ said Dawson, grinning at me.
This march, the SM announced, was to be in ‘extended order drill’.
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Alfred Tinsley asked me, and a high voice came from across the table.
‘You ought to know.’
It was the other kid, Harvey, and I realised that his had been the voice raised the night before against Tinsley’s reading of the
Evidently, the boy and the other boy did not get on.
Five minutes after emerging from the dock, the ‘march at ease’ had sounded, at which everyone began walking more or less normally, most of the blokes smoking at the same time. Young William had called it a lovely day. Well,
