I never entirely recovered from the shock of realizing that the English are just pallid and less frenetic Indians.
Our task was at once to defend them from the Japanese and keep them down, so that their place in the British Empire remained secure.
‘If this is bloody India, roll on fucking Dartmoor!’ Old Bamber gasped, as we milled along the platform fighting the buggers off. Bamber was an old lag and did not care who knew it – a sour man whose days inside prison gave him a natural advantage in the hurly-burly of ‘A’ Company.
‘Grab us a seat, Stubby!’ my mate Wally Page called – like me, he operated a wireless set – as we fought to get into the wooden carriages, struggling against porters and other squaddies.
‘Keep a hold on your rifles!’ Charley Meadows was yelling. ‘Tread on their feet if they get too near for comfort!’ It was all right for the sergeant. He had been out here before in peacetime and knew the ropes.
Neither Wally nor I managed to get a seat. Every little compartment was crowded with men and kit right up to the ceiling. It was better where we were, sitting on our kit in the corridor. We collapsed on our kit-bags, puffing and wiping our crimson faces. We sat there for an hour before the train moved out. For all that while, the porters and other beggars besieged us. The most alarming deformities were presented to our eyes: a child with both arms severed at the elbows, beggars ashake with alien palsies, men with blind sockets of gristle turned imploringly to Heaven, skeletal women with foetus-shaped babies at their breasts, scarecrows with mangled fly-specked limbs, deformed countenances, nightmare bodies – all aimed at us with a malign urgency.
‘Fuck off! Jao! Jao, you bastards, jao!’ we shouted. We had learnt our first and most important word of Urdu.
‘It’s like some fucking madhouse!’ Geordie said. ‘I mean, like, I’d no idea there were places like this here dump.’ He was jammed in the corridor with Wally Page and me. We did not realize then how rare corridors were in Indian trains. When Geordie brought out his cigarettes, a dozen brown hands uncurled through the window towards the packet. Geordie threw two fags out of the window and shouted to everyone to fuck off. Then we lit up. Geordie was a thin and awkward-looking bod until he played football – where he was often inside right to my right wing – on which occasions he took on a sort of terrible grace, his Adam’s apple pumping madly to keep ahead of him. At present you could almost hear his brain wrestling with the concept of India.
Geordie was hatchet-faced, most of his teeth having been removed at the age of sixteen. Wally had a beefy face, a thick neck, and a body like a young bull. The bull-body was covered with yellow hair, less bovine than chick-like; it enclosed Wally from skull to instep as if he had been dipped quickly into scrambled egg. He was apt to punctuate his speech, when chatting to pals, with short jabs to the biceps, as if perpetually testing their amiability.
‘We’ve got a right lot here!’ Geordie exclaimed. ‘You would think they’d sort of get a bit organized. Why doesn’t bloody RSM clear this rabble off the fucking platform?’
‘He’s running up and down the train like an old tart.’ This observation was not entirely true, although certainly RSM Payne was marching from one end of the platform to the other, barking commands with an anxious air. ‘He doesn’t know whether his arsehole’s drilled, bored, or countersunk,’ Wally added.
After more delays, and more parading by Payne, the train began to drag itself along the great platform towards freedom. It was late afternoon. A cross-section of the strange world rolled past us. Tea-venders with urns on their heads, uttering that endless melancholy cry, ‘Chaeeeeee wallow, chaeeeeee wallow!’; the other vendors with their stale buns and withering fruits and fifth-hand copies of Lilliput and Coronet; the three-legged dogs; the ruffians spitting and peeing from squatting positions; the IORs – India Other Ranks – below even us, yet apart from their own breed; the women washing and drinking at a water tank; the monkeys sitting or squabbling on shed roofs; the aimless people, probing into their crutches for wild life as they watched everything fade under dust; the able-bodied kids running level with our accelerating carriages, paws outstretched, still working on squeezing one last baksheesh from us!
This was years before I heard the term ‘population explosion’.
The station was tugged away behind us, its people and pungent smells lost. Instead – the maze of Bombay. Its scents! Its temples! Its wicked complacency! Here and there, we caught sight of a face at a window or a family group on a verandah, immobilized by speed. What was it like, what was the essence of life like, in those demented rooms?
From the nearby compartment of our train came a bellow of laughter. Enoch Ford was yelling at us to see what he had found, his doleful pug face wreathed with smiles. ‘Here, Stubby, dekko this!’ He pointed to an enamel notice affixed inside the sliding door. ‘“This compartment is designed to hold eight Indians” … And there’s bloody twelve of us in here, with all us kit! How do you like that for de-fucking-mocracy?’
Complaints and laughter greeted his remark. But Enoch was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist (by no means the only one in ‘A’ Company), so his comments were always taken with a pinch of salt. We all commiserated cheerfully with each other on the hells of existence and lit up another round of cigarettes.
The lavatory at the end of the corridor, for which a queue was already forming, caused more fun. It was simply a cupboard, without ventilation, in the floor of which was set a round hole. Through this hole, some light and air was admitted, and one had a fine view of the flashing sleepers below.
‘That’s your one way of escape from the Army, lads – down the plughole!’ Corporal Ernie Dutt told us good-humouredly. Ernie took everything good-humouredly – you felt in his presence that even India was partly unintentional.
Nameless slimes worked their way down the sides of the bog. Nameless moulds worked their way up. To balance in the squatting position without touching these sides with your hands, while at the same time shitting accurately through the hole, needed flair, given the violent rocking motion of the train. The hole was encrusted with misplaced turds – some of which, when dry enough, rocked their way to freedom unaided.
We left Bombay. The train forged through open country, picking up speed as though desperately concerned to cover the enormous distances now revealed. Villages were dotted here and there – never were we out of sight of one or more villages, with their attendant cattle. In comparison with the city, everywhere looked prosperous and inviting. There were water-buffaloes, tended by infants; some wallowed up to their nostrils in ponds. The landscape kept whirling and whirling away from us without changing its alien pattern, as if a huge circular panorama were being cranked outside the carriage window. We grew tired of the deception and turned to our own horseplay, spinning out anecdotes about home, consuming many cigarettes, repeating jokes about life aboard the Ironsides, whose hardships were already becoming humorous in retrospect.
‘Crikey,’ exclaimed Wally, striking Charlie Cox on the biceps for emphasis. ‘Soon as we get sorted out, I’m going to get myself a black woman! After that boat, I’ve got a lot of dirty water on my chest.’
‘You ain’t the only one, cock,’ Charlie said. Charlie was our platoon lance-jack. He was in his thirties and going thin on top, but a good man on the Bren gun, sober, thoughtful, and reliable. Charlie had taken awards at Bisley in his time.
We spent a pleasant half-hour describing to each other how the dirty water had piled up on our chests. During this conversation, darkness came down over India.
We knew and cared little of what lay ahead. Somewhere in the future lay the strong likelihood of action against the invading Japanese