Small Island by Andrea Levy
Had to stay alert around these larcenists. Couldn’t shut my eyes to sleep, not even for the briefest doze. Had a pen and an air-letter, you see. The guard, a Tommy, hearing I’d lost all my kit in the fire, had brought them for me. Kept these two possessions on the floor under my mattress. Away from those eight filching hands and envious black eyes that ceaselessly watched me. Thought to write this air-letter home to Queenie. Nothing for it – I’d have to make up what was happening. Moved to a nicer spot, hoped to be home by Christmas, that sort of thing. No need to mention the court-martial or Flight Lieutenant Moon making an example of me. Or the officer who was sent to speak up for me who could find nothing to say about my service record that would change the court’s mind, and avoid the shameful sentence – two weeks in prison among the most heinous cellmates a civilised man could imagine.
Had to rest the air-letter on the floor to write it. Turned my back to the coolies but could still feel them straining to know what the Englishman was doing. Began, as always, ‘Dear Queenie’. Then stopped. Think before you write, the paper urged me – printed at the top with two exclamation marks. Think!!
* * *
My father had been in the army in the last lot. The Great War, they call it. He was in France. A young lad, barely nineteen, with a wife and small son back at home. In letters he’d told Agnes, his wife, my mother, that he was having a good time. She imagined him sipping wine with the locals and sampling loaves of bread as long as his arm. And fighting the Hun, of course – a pot-shot here, a loud bang over there. ‘He’s in the Somme,’ she’d say on the doorstep, like he’d popped down the road for a swift half. She had no idea he’d been living on mud in a battered gash in the ground for three years. That is, until they returned him. He didn’t come on his own, he was dropped off by a truck. Quite a spectacle in the street (everyone out to stare). A parcel being delivered to number twenty-one. Two men, one on either side, marched him up the steps and knocked at the door. Ma answered. Untying her apron, smiling at her hero’s return.
They had to give him a little shove to get him inside.
She got his body back – in one piece, whole, hardly touched. A body that defecated every time a door closed too loudly. At night he rocked, sitting on his bed in striped pyjamas done up to the neck. When he slept he screamed as if someone was pulling out his teeth – the buttons on his pyjamas pinging across the room like shrapnel. Ma had to coax him out from under the bed every time a dog barked. ‘Your father’s lost his mind,’ she told me. And I, aged eight, hoped if someone found it they’d bring it home for him.
He got gradually better (a little), coaxed on by Ma. He was fed his food with a bib tied at his neck. Excrement was cleared up from the floor. Trousers changed. He was gently persuaded out. Ma dressed him in a hat and gaberdine coat and took him with us to the shops. A young girl, barely a woman, handed him a white feather. He played with it like a toy, wiping its softness over his cheek. Until Ma saw it. She spat at the girl and would have done her serious harm if a constable had not been called. ‘He’s done his bit,’ she shouted at everyone come to stare.
She made me hold his hand all the way home.
He dug a trench in the garden. I watched him dig it (a straight line). It was his first (he dug another four). Ma gave him geraniums to plant in them. Showed him how to shovel the earth back over the trenches again. He watched them grow, sometimes sitting for hours, his head in his hands, waiting for the shoots to push up into the light. When the first dazzling red flower appeared, he cried. Openly.
But he was never my pa again. Every time he looked at me was for the first time. It didn’t matter if I’d only just left the room, when I came back I was a stranger. He used to carry me on his shoulders before. Taught me to throw a ball, overarm, like a cricketer. ‘Nice shot, Bernie. You’re learning, my son, you’re learning.’ Brought me Boy’s Own Annuals even before I could read them without help. When he came home from work (the bank) I’d climb on his lap and ask him to read me a story of derring-do (Saber & Spurs or The Sheik’s White Slave). When he left for the war I wanted to know where he was going. The last thing he ever said to me was, ‘Derring-do, Bernard. Your pa’s off for derring-do.’
Ma aged sixty years in ten. She sagged and shrank. She would have liked a big family, more than just me. But her husband couldn’t do it any more. At least, not when she was there. All she saw were the crusty white stains on the sheets, on his pants. She’d turn away. Call me to clear up that mess.
She had a big house and a small pension. The handed-down silver cruet that sat on the parlour table disappeared, one piece at a time. So did the rings on her fingers. Except her wedding band, which she twirled every time she watched my father in his garden. She let rooms in the house. Spent her time chasing rent and morals up and down the staircase. Listening at the parlour door in case evil came into her home. When I left school she put on her hat and best coat (saved twice from the pawnbroker) and visited the bank where my father used to work as a clerk. She came back with a job for me, starting the next day. ‘They owe him that much,’ was all she said.
She died aged forty-two. Cancer, they whispered. A lump in her breast that feasted on her from the inside. Before she died she managed to ask, ‘Who’s going to look after him?’ I didn’t say a thing. What was there to say? Who’d look after him?
I would.
Pa was quiet when Queenie moved in. Tending his garden, sitting in his chair (no trouble). He knew she was something different. Followed her round with his eyes. She cleaned the place. Said she was adding a woman’s touch. Flowers, embroidered runners on the sideboard. Pa started smiling, tapping his foot to the wind-up gramophone. Humming to ‘Show Me The Way To Go Home’. She danced with him, one foot at a time, in front of the hearth. Then the war came and the bombs. His excreta flowed freely again. Out came the bib at mealtimes. We couldn’t get him into the shelter. He always stayed under the bed, quaking like a girl.
‘It would be the best thing if he did go,’ Queenie had said once.
It was the first time I realised she could be heartless.
After a raid I’d have to coax my father out from under the bed with bread and jam – the wireless on so loud it sounded like we lived in a dance hall. Sometimes he’d dance round the room on his own, holding his arms up for an imaginary partner when he thought no one was looking.
They were running out of young men in this new war, conscripting older and older men every week. There was nothing else for it. Fire watch and black-out duty weren’t enough. And a bank clerk who spent all day writing figures in ledger books would never be essential to the home front. It was my turn for derring-do.
All I knew was that I was going overseas. Embarkation leave – one week with loved ones, then off. Of course I had no idea where I was being posted but Queenie kept asking. ‘It must be somewhere hot if they’ve given you a tropical uniform,’ she said. The chaps who trained with me laughed at that – tropical uniform could mean Iceland or Siberia. ‘You must know where you’re going. Can’t you ask them?’ She thought I was just keeping it to myself. Of course they wouldn’t tell us, otherwise it would be news in every dance hall that ever saw a chap dressed in his best blues. ‘They won’t tell me,’ I told her. I’d shouted in the end, raised my voice.
I hadn’t wanted to spend my last day with her like that. We should have been having a kiss and a cuddle. She let me do it to her, of course, but only because I was her husband and going away to who knew where? She let me, but she lay there like a limp rag. Wouldn’t even put her arms across my back. And as for kissing – she turned her head away. I had to kiss her cheek. I mean, my mother let me do that. When she waved me goodbye she said, ‘Take care and be sure and write.’ But she’d shut the front door behind me before I’d got down to the last step.
Liverpool was overcast in those days before I left. Dishwater sky. Wet-weekend-in-Wigan days, Queenie would have called them. I left with a heavy heart (I’ll be honest). Wished I’d parted from Queenie on better t
I’d watched on deck in drenching rain as the coastline gradually slipped into the sea. I’d never left England before. Only once could I recall turning back to look at land. Paddled out too far at Dymchurch. Startled to realise I’d gone so far. Ma, a little unrecognisable figure on the beach, calling me back. Pa wading out, sweeping me up safe in his arms.
England disappeared so quickly. Soon there was nothing but sea. My legs wobbled. Couldn’t get my balance, find my grip. I sat down to watch the spot where my country dissolved. It was there, etched on to my eyes like an afterview of the sun. Pa’s back as he tended his vegetables. Queenie waving at the door before she slammed it shut. All were left indelible.
I held my pen above that blue flimsy paper on that prison floor. Held it there for so long that the sweat trickled down my arm and dripped off the nib like teardrops. Soon the paper was too soggy to write on. And ‘Dear Queenie’ had blurred to a blue stain then run until it was just a blot.
Forty-four
Bernard
He said it like I’d won the demob in a raffle. You wouldn’t have known the man had put me in prison in the first place. Looked me straight in the eye. Happy to deliver his news. No doubt thought someone with my record would consider it an honour that a CO would tell them personally. ‘Bligh. Your number’s up. Collect your kit from Cal. You’ve got a week to get to Bombay. You’re going home.’
Rumour had it our unit was one of the last left in India. And, thanks to this CO, I was later than most. One chap had even gone native. Refused a boat home – took his demob in Cal. But only a few of the unlucky were still left counting. Flight Lieutenant Moon, sitting high in his truck, wanted to tell his driver to carry on but stuttered over the command. ‘Ca-ca-ca—’ he said, before miming it with a flick of his hand.
There was nothing left of the basha. The RAF police had cleared every last trace away. Except the scorched marks where it once stood. A sooty black square drawn in the dust. It was impossibly small. Looking no more than the size of a packing case. Hard to imagine where charpoys lay, let alone where eight large men fell. Alf Lamb, Bill Bulmer, Nobby Bloomfield, I knew them all. Nobby especially. We’d been on a river salvage together. He’d volunteered to dive into the water, swim under the wreck of the plane to attach cables round it. I was on the party that heaved the Wellington out. So was Alf, I believe. It only took a hint of interest to get Jock Davison to recount the story of the tiger he killed for some natives. Attached a pig to a tree evidently. Sat all night in the branches waiting. Got it with one bullet between the eyes. He was a local hero for a while. Didn’t know Gordon Pink or Jack Bark – they’d not been long on our unit. Ron Simpson was an unlucky man even without the fire on his score sheet. Been in Normandy for D Day. Parachuted in. Watched most of his unit shot down before they hit the ground. Got wounded twice himself. Thought he was going home on VE Day. Drunk as a navvy, climbed a lamp-post with a Union Jack painted on his bare behind. Next week he was marched on to a boat out east. The eighth name on that gruesome list was, of course, my friend George Maximillian.
This stripling CO’s vehicle drove right across the scorched remains of the basha. I watched it as I stood there saluting this officer in the dusty wake of his vehicle while he swerved two tyre tracks over the grave of eight aircraftmen. Basha no longer there, it was a bit of a handy short cut for him. I had to spit on the ground after he’d gone – rid my mouth of the grit and dust, you see.
So that was how I found myself once more in Calcutta. Vultures still sat like scrawny hunch-backed hags looking down from the rooftops. They watched me as I walked along. Silly, but their gaze was so keen I imagined they recognised me from the last time I was here. The carnage they gorged on then was now all cleared away. Of course. The piles of putrefying rubbish – the pecked and gnawed bodies of the dead – all gone. But still those ugly beasts seemed to be dallying patiently for some next time. Picked up my blues from the holding centre. Only bit of kit I had left. The forage cap made me look like an old man. One of those coves from the Home Guard, playing soldiers. Trousers were roomy, jacket a little big. Left them there years before, you see, when I was a stouter man.
It was in the maidan I saw him walking. Johnny Pierpoint – Spike to his asinine friends. Wouldn’t have believed it could be him. Too carefree. Sauntering. A skip in his step. But he stopped me. Hand on my arm. Held me back. To a trusting eye, he was pleased to see me.
‘Well, well, well, Pop. You still here? I’d have thought they’d have got you on a boat before this. What you been up to?’
Nothing for it. Had to tell him I was on my way to Bombay.
‘What you doing in Cal then?’ he said. Then stopped my answer with, ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve finally taken my advice. Eh, Pop? Come to get some bint here? See if you can’t learn a few things to show that wife of yours before you get home?’
I was speechless. The scoundrel should have been locked away not standing in this sweltering city insulting me with ‘I can recommend a few. Not down Free School Street, though. Let me give you an address. They’ll see you’re all right. All very clean. Very young. Pretty. You know.’
‘No, thank you,’ I told him.
‘Pop, do yourself a favour. Your gentlemen’s friend really does need a decent outing. It’s withering away in there.’
The scurrilous blighter! He should have been in prison and I told him so.
‘Prison! Why? What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘For all that business.’
‘What? Showing a lady a good time?’
‘Good God, man, can you think of nothing else?’
‘I can, but I don’t like to.’ He started laughing. His eye winking rapidly as a faulty bulb. Pushed a piece of paper into my hand. When I didn’t take it he stuffed it into my pocket. Patted it twice, saying, ‘Trust me, you won’t regret it. You ask your chum, Maxi.’
‘What’s Maxi got to do with it?’
‘He didn’t regret it. Came back a few times for more.’
‘Rubbish!’ I told him.
‘Don’t take my word, ask him.’
‘Maxi’s dead,’ I said. That wiped his smug face clean.
‘Dead!’
‘Died in a basha fire. Him and seven others.’
‘Jesus. Bad business. Dead. How did that happen?’
‘It was your fault,’ I told him.
He looked at me, dumb as a coolie. Mouth agape. Eyes popping. Who would blink first, me or him? ‘Come again?’ he finally said.
‘I said it was your fault. The fire. The fire that killed them was because of you.’
‘I hardly knew him. I hadn’t seen him since Cal.’ He frowned, his dark eyebrows meeting in a hooded V over his eyes. I almost felt sorry for him. A lot to carry. A lot to bear – the death of eight men. Then his mouth flickered into a grin. Slowly revealing two front teeth. Stained with nicotine they looked to be made of wood. ‘I’ve been nowhere near your unit for ages. What are you going on about now, Pop?’
‘They wanted to get you off the charge. They had a meeting in the basha. It got burned down with them in it.’
‘What charge?’
‘That business.’
‘What business?’
‘Disobeying an order.’
‘Oh, that! Didn’t you lot hear? They dropped all those charges after a couple of days. I got posted with another unit. The CO couldn’t be bothered with it. Said the war had been over for too long. Me and Geordie. We should all have been home anyway, he said. I’d got a good record. He just gave us a bit of a warning. Discipline, blah, blah, blah. That sort of thing. I promised to be a good boy from now on and he forgot about it.’ He told his story like I’d be pleased for him. The man was an idiot. ‘But it’s bad about Maxi,’ he said.
‘He was a decent man,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but he knew how t
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Have you no decency? Men died trying to save your skin.’
‘Look, Pop. They were your unit, I know. You’re upset. Who wouldn’t be? But it’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘Nothing to do with you? It’s got everything to do with you and your sort.’
He stared at me for some time, wondering how to respond. Looked over my shoulder. Bit his lip. Down to his feet. Back to my face. ‘Fuck off, Pop.’ He turned his back to me. Took two steps away. Then stopped, turned on his heel to face me again. ‘Come to think of it, didn’t a little birdie tell me something about you? Weren’t you in trouble? Weren’t you in the clink?’
I felt no need to answer him. Adopted a parade-ground stance. Head up. Chest out.
‘You were, weren’t you? What was it for? Being a miserable bastard? Being the most useless erk on your unit?’
I grabbed him round the throat. Got my whole hand over his Adam’s apple. Felt my nails in his skin. But he pushed me off – younger man, you see. He started walking away. I chased after him. I’d never meaningfully punched anyone in my life but, by God, I was ready to try. He dodged me as I whacked at air. Lost my balance. The fool was laughing at me. I came at him again. He lifted up one gangly arm and rammed it on my forehead. Long as an ape’s, his arm – my punches could get nowhere near him. He had me struggling, ineffectual, like a dunce with a bully. Whacking the air between us. Passers-by looked amused. Thought these two servicemen must be having some high jinks. But he had a tiger by the tail. I lunged at him when he dropped his hold. But he grabbed me. Spinning my arm up round my back. Thought he would rip it from my shoulder. Mouth next to my ear he spat into it, ‘God, Pop, you’re just a laughing-stock, you know that? Everyone says it. Maxi was the only one who could stomach you. Go and get yourself fucked properly, Pop. Show that poor wife of yours that you did something useful while you were out here.’