BRIAN ALDISS
A Soldier Erect
or Further Adventures
of the Hand-Reared Boy
Table of Contents
Introduction
As she turned around, I saw part of her backside, leaned over and laid my face on it, crying about my broken drum; the evening sunshine made it all bright – how strange I should recollect that so clearly, but I have always recollected sunshine.
My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’
‘Cavaliers, and strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano though he is an Inglesite.
‘We do not believe it,’ replied several grave voices. ‘It is not possible.’
The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow
Whilst writing The Hand-Reared Boy, I began to consider a further book, where we might meet with my Stubbs when adult. Taking the time scale into consideration, it seemed likely that young Stubbs would join the army. A Soldier Erect is wholehearted in its awfulness. Here is Horatio Stubbs again, fresh from his adventures in the first novel of the trilogy.
We find him now complaining about a party, which was planned to celebrate his departure overseas with the Mendip Regiment to fight the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. (Burma until this date had been part of the British Empire.) Stubbs begins his account in the grumbling mode – a mode which endures, with the volume being turned up throughout the book. Complaint about war is hardly surprising, but the entire novel has implications beyond this, confronting us with passages full of filth, fear and frustrated fornications; passages engendered in large part by the horrors and hungers of global disruption.
Stubbs and his young mates, ill-informed as they are, have a hatred for the lower orders of Indian society with which they are forced to mingle. One might wonder what the Indians of today would make of these violent episodes and impressions, launched upon us with demonic energy.
A short extract might tell us what we are in for. Here are the words written on a card a beggar hands round on a dreary train journey. It reeks of human misery – yet I believe it to be a humorous triumph.
‘Sir,
This unfortunate idiot is a lunatic from the malayli states. He has not escaped. He asks you to be excused. This is not his fault. The bearer was always dumb. He cannot speak since after birth. The foolish fellow and his brothers are also speechless and without voice. He lost his parent. They early departed their sense. His younger sister is also blind and demented.
These three depend on this one. He laboured by the railway. Their mother was never known. His auntie died in the prime. His father was serving longwhile in South Indian Railway Co. Ltd., so Railway Officers have excused this imbecile and so kindly pay him charity and God help you.
Signed: A.R.M. Shoramanor Madras Dorosani Cristian.
Mrs Pandambai, B.A. (Oxen) Principal Theosophical Ladies’ College, Lucknow.
Please to Re-Turn This Notice After The Execution.’
Once we arrive in Burma with Stubbs we find things a little better. The Commander gives the order:
‘During this operation, we have two objectives: to kill as many Nips as we can, and to relieve the Kohima Garrison.’
There follows a record of hard and dangerous times, and though accounts of the war in Burma have drifted into several of my other books, here lies, I think, the most comprehensive account of a struggle staged so far from help and home.
Still moving, the novel is summarised by the resigned despondency of the sentences with which it concludes:
‘The early monsoon rain began to fall over our positions. Down the road, the guns were pounding away at Viswema.’
Brian Aldiss,
Oxford 2012
As the last party-guests were groping their way into the blackout, I belted upstairs and shut myself in my bedroom. My dressing-gown fell off its hook as the door slammed, dropping like a dying man, one arm melodramatically over the bed. I dragged my sports-jacket off my shoulders, rolled it into a bundle, and flung it into the far corner of the room, all of ten feet away.
On the top of the chest-of-drawers stood a carved bear, given to me on my tenth birthday by an uncle lately back from Switzerland, a bag of green apples, a framed photograph of Ida Lupino, my uniform dress cap, and three woollen vests. I swept them all off and climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, where I squatted, groaning and rolling my head from side to side.
God, what sodding, shagging, scab-devouring misery it all was! The humiliation – the ignobility – of the whole shitting shower! The creepy, crappy narrowness of my parents’ life! And that was supposed to be my embarkation leave party before I went abroad to serve my king and cunting country! If that was embarkation leave, roll on bloody germ warfare!
By kneeling up a little on the chest-of-drawers, I could press my head and shoulders against the ceiling and so resemble a deformed caryatid. Thinking vicious army thoughts, I pushed one side of my face against the flaking ceiling. My jaw slumped down, my tongue dripped saliva, my eyelids flickered like an ancient horror film, revealing acres of white-of-eye.