Irma actually smiled. It changed her completely. If I had hung around long enough I might have fallen in love.
She said, ‘Nothing. Nothing but having drunk half a gallon of lemon Cremola Foam stirred up with about eight Alka-Seltzers. It makes you look very strange for a short time, but the effects wear off quickly. You’ve no idea what some men will do to avoid conscription.’
‘I have. I don’t suppose it would help if I started falling off my chair?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ She gave me the smile again. I would have told jokes all day to be rewarded with smiles like that. ‘You’re perfectly A1 – I can tell it just by looking at you . . . but we’ll go through the motions just in case. If you go behind the curtain and drop your trousers, Dr Crippen will be with you in a moment.’
It could only happen to me, I thought.
Both medics took less than fifteen minutes between them. I finished in front of Irma. She said, ‘You’ll do, Mr Bassett, although you drink too much. You’ll have a beer gut by the time you’re forty unless you ease up and take some exercise.’
‘I’ll remember that, Doctor.’
‘Good. Now bend over that chair back please, and drop your trousers again.’ For a moment she sounded like my old headmaster: when you walked into his study he invariably had a glint in his eye, and a cane in his hand.
‘I thought you didn’t do backsides, Doctor.’
‘I don’t, but I do give the inoculations, and you have a bucketful coming up, according to your RAF forms. Try to relax: I’ll re-sharpen the needle after the first ten.’
They always like to finish with a laugh, the doctors – have you noticed? After she’d finished with my bum and my upper thigh I felt as if I would never sit down again. Bloody sadist. The last thing she said was, ‘We always tell people not to drink alcohol for at least twenty-four hours after this course of injections.’
‘I’ll remember that too, Doctor.’ I hate people telling me what not to do.
Alex always brings out the Jerry in me: you know – orders will be obeyed at all times without question. He told me to get lost afterwards, but not so lost that I couldn’t meet him back near the medical centre for opening time. He thought we could get drunk together, and get up to date. I don’t know where he got the idea I’d enjoy going to a pub; after all, the doctor had just banned me.
I walked around Croydon to kill time. It was, and is, a terrible place. Grey people, living in grey houses, driving grey Hillmans, working in grey offices and grey factories. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that God was inordinately fond of grey, and in Croydon had created His masterpiece. After that I was ready to get drunk, and from the number of people already in the pub by half past five, I reckoned that most of Croydon agreed with me.
A few hours later, the woman doctor came pushing through the crowd with her medical bag. She nodded to me, but moved on up to a small raised stage. I wondered if she moonlighted as a stripper, but wasn’t all that disappointed when she was joined by a small jazz band, put the silver cornet she’d pulled from her bag to her lips, and began to blow like an angel. She caught my eye halfway through the set, smiled that smile again, and began to drop the spectacular notes of ‘Doctor Jazz’ in front of us. That was when I realized that Croydon had always been one of my favourite places on the planet.
I remembered what it was like in the war – having joined up in the RAF then, I was sent back home again with a silly little silver badge to stick on my jacket, and told to wait my turn. The badge was to prove to strangers you were doing your bit. I had been impatient as hell to get into uniform. This time it wasn’t like that. Not at all. I simply didn’t want to go, and a moany little voice at the back of my brain was wheedling away with You’ve done your bloody bit; why can’t they pick on somebody else?
The weeks before I had been called up to my basic training unit in the 1940s had been full of purpose and vigour . . . principally trying it on with girls I might never get a chance with again, and eventually losing my virginity with a generous neighbour. This time I prevaricated, did nothing, avoided decisions and wasted time. I slept with Elaine again – more for the form of it than anything else, both of us working off guilts we didn’t understand – and afterwards I felt even more fed up than before.
When the brown envelope eventually arrived it was smaller than I remembered, but almost a relief. Elaine was watching me in my cramped office when I opened it – she had taken to standing close to me all the time, which crowded me. I didn’t like that, but we’d been skin-to-skin like old times the night before, so it wouldn’t have been right to tell her to back off. And before you get the idea that I was demonstrating some of my finer feelings by that decision, I wasn’t. I simply didn’t know when I’d want her again, and wasn’t going to cut off my nose to spite my face.
She asked, ‘This is it, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, love; I’m afraid it is. This time I really have to pack my bag.’
‘Well then? Where?’
I had been afraid she’d ask that. The Canal Zone, Malaya, Cyprus or Kenya? What romantic destination was suitable for a brave British serviceman these days?
‘Dungeness.’
‘What?’
‘You heard
