As I came away with it, Wally and Geordie made pantomimes of staggering about in disgust, clutching their throats and vomiting into the ditch.
‘Don’t bring that horrible thing near me, Stubbs!’ Wally said. ‘You must have more bollocks than brains! We haven’t been out here five minutes and you’re going fucking native already. Isn’t he, Geordie?’
‘Besides, if he’d hung on, he could have got the thing for half a rupee,’ Geordie said. ‘It’s really a terrible country – you have to say it!’
‘Git your loin cloth on, Stubbs, you jungley wallah!’
‘I’ll fling you into the fucking ditch, Page, along with the other turds, if you don’t shut your arse! Let’s go and get a bloody beer!’
After a bloody beer, we went to the cinema. Being a garrison town, Kanchapur boasted three cinemas. One, which showed only native films, was Out of Bounds. The other two, the Vaudette and the Luxor, were in bounds and changed their programme every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. Wally, Geordie, and I went to the Luxor, sitting among the peanut shells in the front row but one, to wallow in The Girl He Left Behind in which – have I remembered aright after all these years? – Alice Faye sang A Journey to a Star and No Love, No Nothin’.
Later, back in the aimless main street, night hung like Technicolor in the trees. The promptings of lust were on every side. Kanchapur’s street lights, infrequent and yellow, were besieged by a confetti of insects. Every shop was open. Soldiers apart, there were not so many people about, yet the impression was of bustle. A man in a dhoti spat a great gob of betel-juice at our feet as we passed.
‘Dirty bastards!’ Wally said automatically.
We made our way to a restaurant and sat out on the verandah bellowing for a waiter with plenty of fine deep-throated ‘Jhaldi jaos’. We ordered five eggs-and-chips and beer three times. It felt good to be sitting there, chatting idly about the film as we ate, occasionally waving to a friend in the street, and slapping the odd mosquito that settled on our fists.
Geordie set his knife and fork down and leaned back in the wicker chair.
‘Aye, well, that was almost as good as getting stuck up Alice Faye.’
‘I’d rather have Ida Lupino.’
‘Ida Lu-fucking-pino? Balls, she’s got no figure – Alice Faye’s lovely, built like a brick shithouse!’
‘She’s just an old cow. Even you can see that, Geordie!’
While this debate on female standards of beauty was in progress, Wally leant forward and grabbed my rolled-up picture of Hanuman, which was lying on the table.
‘Let go of that, you bastard!’ I seized him by his curly yellow wrist. He laughed, pulled back, and crunched the cylinder. I hit him in the chest with my left fist.
The next moment, we were on our feet and confronting each other. I was so angry, I hardly took any notice of Geordie, who was shouting feebly at us both to sit down.
‘Come outside, you lousy thieving bastard, and I’ll teach you to maul other people’s property about!’
‘You couldn’t teach a pig to piss, you ill-tempered bastard! I only wanted to look at the fucking thing!’
‘What did you screw it up for then, you interfering cunt?’
Wally went all quiet and crouchy, as if he was about to jump on me.
‘Don’t you call me a cunt, you Midland prick, you, or I’ll sort you out!’
‘You and who else?’ I waved a fist in his face.
Waiters were running up, fluttering their hands about us and cooing with alarm. People at other tables were jumping up, and Geordie was trying to get us away. ‘For Christ sake, you couple of dumb ’erbs, do you want the fucking Redcaps on us? Pipe down! Pay your bloody money and let’s get out of here!’
He picked the battered roll of picture off the floor where Wally had thrown it and, with much ushering and swearing, managed to get me out of the restaurant. Wally had marched out ahead of us. I pushed past him, knocked down Geordie’s detaining hand, and hurried away from them into the bazaar. God knows, I was prepared to swallow the old working-class ethic whole if I could, but there were times when it stood revealed in all its shoddy triviality! I could be as stupid as the next bloke, but Wally’s stupidity was an invasion of privacy!
Clutching my maligned picture, I walked on, although I could hear Geordie calling to me. My regret was that I had not given Wally a bunch of fives in the mush while I had the chance.
My temper was troubling me, as it had ever since my early school days. The tendency to get involved in fights had already upset my army career. I was sixteen when I left home and went down to London to seek out Virginia Traven, my great love. Without her, I floundered in the war-dazed city. What pavements I trod were nothing to me. All the streets under the sky of 1939 held only frustration and anger.
My pride had not allowed me to return meekly home from London. Had my father ever come down to find me, to collect me, to take me back – yes, then I would gladly have returned, and felt no defeat. But he never came. When I realized that he never was coming, I marched into the Army Recruiting Centre in Leicester Square, lied about my age, and signed on for what was then the traditional ‘seven-and-five’ – which is to say, seven years’ service on the Active List and five on the Reserves.
I was posted to the 2nd Royal Mendips, then in training near Wells and busily covering most of Somerset on foot, stomach, or whatever parts of the body best suited official inclination. When the regiment was shipped over to France in the New Year of 1940, I went with them. There we proceeded to acquaint the countryside round Arras with the stomachs, feet and other organs which had proved so popular in Somerset. To break this routine, I volunteered to go on a radio-operator’s course which, I understood, would take me to Paris. Paris! Gay Paree! The very name evoked a knowing leer on any soldier’s face.
When the fate-deciding list came through, I was not dispatched to Paris. I found myself instead in a North-facing Nissen hut in Prestatyn, on the North Wales coast. The power-that-be had discovered that no man could become proficient in the mysteries of 19 set unless he had been exposed to the ice-filled gales that blew in off the grey waters of Liverpool Bay. While I was undergoing this mixture of technology and meteorology, my mates in the BEF were suddenly plunged into heavy defensive fighting in Belgium, as Hitler’s then invincible divisions rolled through the Low Countries towards France and Paris.
The Mendips were involved in the fighting around Louvain, as a thousand heavy tanks rolled down on them. Many of the friends I knew were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans, while the mangled units retreated to Dunkirk and the coastal ports as best they could. The bad news seeped back to Prestatyn. Guilt and betrayal seemed to be my lot. I got drunk whenever I could afford it, and was always involved in fights.
At the same time, the death of my friends made me a sort of hero. I used to claim – the feeblest and worst of jokes – that France would never have fallen if I had been there to sort things out. Only movement comforted my confusion and, in those terrible young summer days when France was collapsing, movement was everywhere in Britain. The steam trains pulled in and out of stations; evacuees went towards unknown foster-parents; hands waved; women fluttered damp handkerchiefs, and were at once forgotten at unknown destinations. The next day, in another place, you went on parade with a hangover and a bloody eye.
Having completed my operator’s course, I eventually rejoined the unit, then being reformed after Dunkirk. They were short of trained men, and I was given my first stripe. We moved up to the wilds of Yorkshire. Desperately hard up for equipment, we exercised over hills and dales, or endured an endless series of assault courses. The war laboured on, and for some unfathomable reason the seasons took turn and turn-about just as in peacetime, and the invasion of Britain never came.
After a year, I got my second stripe – only to be busted