Pale Shadow of Science

The weeks of our incarceration passed, Hitler grew bolder. Echoes of that larger world reached our backwater. We had a German-Jewish boy whom we called Killy-Kranky. He was lively and comic and popular because he taught us German swear-words and insults. ‘Du bist eine alte Kamel!’ was, we were assured, a terribly rude thing to say. We treasured the knowledge; I at least have never forgotten it, my first sentence in German.

Poor Killy-Kranky! His parents disappeared. He had to stay on at school in the holidays. One day in the summer holiday, my father drove our family past St Paul’s. There, in a corner of the immense field, stood Killy-Kranky, gazing out across the wire fence at liberty.

‘Look, there’s Killy-Kranky!’ I exclaimed. ‘Can I go and speak to him, Dad?’

‘What do you want to say to him?’ my father asked, contemptuously. Of course it was one of those adult questions which cannot be answered. We sped on our way.

After the beginning of one summer term, an Italian drove up St Paul’s shingle-strewn drive in a big car. He was tall, bronzed, elegant, well dressed. He came with Mr Fangby to speak to us in the classroom. We stuttered or were silent. He spoke excellent English and smelt of perfume. With him was his little son, aged five. The son was going to stay with us while his father went back to Italy, to resolve a few problems.

I still remember seeing that man embrace his son in the drive, squatting on his heels to do so. He gave him a child’s paper – probably Chatterbox – and kissed him fondly. Then he drove away.

We were so cruel to that boy. He wore a little blouse, with braces under it. This was cause for endless amusement. We teased him about it, about everything. We ran away with his Chatterbox, which he tried always to keep clutched to him, a symbol of his father. We excelled in being unpleasant. We made his life a misery. We made his every day a torment.

Why did we do it? Our triumph over the child was the most awful thing about St Paul’s. Years later, as an adult, I was wracked with guilt about our treatment of that Italian-Jewish child whose name eludes me. Why had we no compassion? Was it because we recognized in his father a civility superior to ours? Was it the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon way of life? Or was it something more basic, more cruel, in human behaviour?

The child’s only refuge was Legge, the other outcast among us. Legge’s popularity after the duckpond incident had not lasted. Tom had fought and beaten him, too. Unlike the bootboy, Legge could not escape, except to the upper branches of the apple trees. There he took the Italian boy, hauling him up like a gorilla with young. There they sat. Waiting for end of term and a release from misery.

Next term, the Italian boy did not reappear. My remorse did not develop till some years later, when I started to comprehend the world from an adult viewpoint. Compassion springs from a position of some security.

The assistant master, Mr Noland, was sacked. He went out and got drunk one night. Next morning, he refused to leave his bed. Fangby sent Tom to Noland’s room to command him to come down. The answer was a rude one. So Noland left at the end of the week. There were those who hung out of the window and cried openly as he drove off in his backfiring blue car. Those who had almost drowned at his hands experienced a certain relief.

It is easy to believe now that St Paul’s was more unbearable for adults – perhaps even for Fangby – than for its principal victims, the boys. Perhaps the rule applies to all prisons.

To cheer us up, Fangby took us out. He drove us over to Wroxham, where the bad meat came from, where there was a cinema. I still remember the excitement of being out that night, of speed, of seeing the willows flash by and vanish forever from the blaze of the headlights.

We went to see a film version of LornaDoone, the boring novel of which we had read. The film was better. John Ridd fought Carver Doone, and Carver Doone fell back into an Exmoor bog and sank slowly down, down into the bog. It compelled our imaginations for a long while.

Legge was caught in his own personal bog. He did something which Fangby found unforgiveable. What it could have been still escapes conjecture. Was he caught smoking? I do not remember that any of us had cigarettes in a world where even ice cream was forbidden. Was he caught masturbating, or even in bed with another boy? With the Italian boy? It seems unlikely. We knew nothing about sex. We were still at an age when we were uninterested in our own or other penises. When Roger returned at the beginning of one term to say he had been in bed with his sister and she had told him that cocks went into the wee-wee hole and produced children, we were shocked by such coarseness, and gave him six with his own cricket bat.

Whatever it was Legge had done, he was treated like an absolute pariah. He was removed to a bare room in the attics and his clothes were taken away. The rest of us moved in silence and fear.

Then he was brought down among us to the classroom. Fangby announced that his crime was so great that it could not be mentioned. It meant that he was to be beaten and expelled. A similar fate would befall us if we did the same thing.

Legge was deathly white. He was told to drop his pyjama trousers and bend down. Fangby then proceeded to thrash him with a cricket stump. He laid on twelve strokes, putting all his porpoise-like strength behind them. One of our number fainted, another ran out crying and was dragged back, another was sick all over the floor and was made to mop it up later. Then Legge was helped away. We never saw him again.

Before that incident, I had not minded Fangby. There was at times a sort of cringing friendliness about the man, as if he might be afraid of us, or at least had some sympathy for our predicament. Now we all hated him. He had utterly estranged himself from us.

It was clear that to become gentlemen we had to undergo the same sort of treatment as Dr Moreau dished out to the Beast People on his celebrated Island. Fear and force make gentlemen. It is the Law.

Long Cut to Burma (#ulink_310386e5-d5c6-5c2a-90e2-c9dc7e044eb8)

War shapes individuals and nations like no other experience. As my boyhood slipped away, Europe, with a terrifying inevitability, sank toward Hitler’s war. When I was thirteen, we started digging air raid shelters at school. But at the age of eighteen, I was drawn into the war against Japan, and despatched to the East: to India, the great whirlpool that sucked men into action in Burma.

Things get out of control in wartime and, in 1944, I found myself spending sixteen days on an Indian train. A detachment of eleven of us entrained at Mhow station. We crammed into a compartment with a little bone notice above the door: TO SEAT EIGHT INDIANS.

We were loaded down with kit and rations. We crammed in somehow, in the best of spirits as troops always are when on the move. Mhow station, beset by monkeys and banyan trees, smelt powerfully of cooking, frangipani, animal droppings, and hot steam engines. Soon the station fell back into the night.

We pulled the windows down to enjoy the warm breeze. We rolled our sleeves down. We applied acidic anti-mosquito cream to face and hands. All night we sat among our kitbags and rifles, talking and joking. In charge of us was a genial Yorkshireman, Ted Monks – fresh from England like the rest of us. He was a foreman bricklayer in Civvy Street.

Indian towns came flashing out of the night like Catherine wheels. A nostril full of pungency, a glimpse of eyeballs human and animal, and we would be tearing through, on, on, with the challenge of Burma somewhere at the end of the line. By dawn we fell asleep over our kitbags, huddled against one another or dozing on the luggage racks.

The Mhow quartermaster had issued us with rations for what was intended to be merely a five-day journey. No air transport in those days, you note. By the time we emptied a tin full of stale hard tack, we had a useful pail. In this pail – whenever the train stopped for inscrutable reasons of its own – we collected hot water from the engine with which to brew ourselves tea.

India was endless. The railway lines were endless. Sometimes the train pulled into a siding, where we waited in heat and silence for an hour or two for an express to thunder by.

Days passed. We ran out of food and money. The great lands, the bringers of famine and plenty, rolled past. Flat, achingly flat, always inhabited. Out on the glazed plains, frail carts moved, figures laboured. Always the bent back. No matter what befell elsewhere, those figures – men and women – were committed to their labours without remission. While I stared out of the window, talk in the compartment was of home, always of home, the work and fun, the buggers at the factory, the knee-tremblers after dark behind the pub, the years of unemployment and disillusion in the Welsh mines. All this was news to me at eighteen, and had almost the same impact as the landscape. I felt so ashamed of my middle-class background that never once in all my army years did I mention that I had been to public school.

Our detachment was at the mercy of the RTOs along the route. RTOs were Railways Transport Officers; they sat at various points along the system of routes the British had forged, like spiders in a big metal web. Occasionally, they would call us off the train; occasionally, we could wrest from them either fresh supplies or a meagre travel allowance.

The RTO at Allahabad, a great steel town, allowed us to sleep on the platform of his magnificent station. Next day at dawn, we were put on a milk train heading East. Every day, Burma – a word synonymous with death – drew nearer.

We visited Benares and, untutored as we were, had only contempt for the pilgrims washing in the filthy waters of the Ganges. Then the train was carrying us across the infinities of the Ganges plain. Again the labouring figures of people and animals, committed every day to struggle beneath the sun.

The line ran straight ahead until it faded into sizzling heat. Our train stopped unexpectedly at a wayside halt. On the platform stood a corporal, immaculate in his KD, rigidly to attention. The Indian passengers leaning from the window or hanging on the outside of the coaches took some interest in him. He was bellowing at the top of his voice.

‘Reinforcement detachment from Mhow heading for 36 British Division, disembark from train immediately. Bring your kit. At the double. Fall in.’

‘Christ, that’s us,’ said Ted Monks. ‘We’re not getting off here, are we? Where the hell’s this? This is nowhere.’

We de-trained and fell in with our kit and our sack of bread and bully beef. We stood to attention. The train pulled away. It disappeared into the distance, down the straight line, across the great plain.

Without explanations, we were ‘fell in’ outside the halt in a column of twos. On orders from the corporal, we began to march. A dusty track stretched away from the railway line at right angles to it. We progressed along it, sweating in silence.

After an hour’s march, we reached a transit camp. It was arbitrarily established, and could just as well have been next to the railway line. There was no shade. We paraded in the sun to be addressed by a sergeant, who told us we were there to get properly washed and dhobied; we would be given a meal and would proceed with our journey in the morning. We were fell out.

As Monks said, we had arrived at nowhere. Wild dogs and jackals ran through our bashas during the night (I was thrilled – something that did not happen at home). Kite hawks – the hated kite hawks – dived down and scooped food out of the mess tins of anyone unwary enough to cross an open space with his meal. Beyond the perimeters of the camp was flat desolation. The camp was the British world.

One member of the camp staff was a man I recognized. He had been on the same troopship, the Otranto, which had brought our posting to India. I remembered him from among thousands of other troops aboard because he walked about in a distinctly civilian way (i.e. stoop-shouldered) singing a snatch of song over and over again.

Take thou this rose,

This little thing…

There he was, bathed in Indian sunlight, clutching a piece of paper going about some negligible errand. I got close to him. He was singing to himself. It was the same song. I dubbed him the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah. When we got talking, I learnt that he prided himself on this snip of a posting he had secured, office orderly at the Transit Camp; it meant that he would not have to go to Burma. I was convinced that anywhere was better than that nowhere camp.

A year or so later, it happened that I saw the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah again. He was alone in a crowd. To my delight, he was still singing the same unfinished lines of song to himself. War had no power to alter whatever was on the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah’s mind.

We returned to our journey with a sack full of fresh provisions. The train was shunted into a siding at Jamalpore, where monkeys swarmed down, climbed throught the open windows of our carriage and stole two loaves of bread from our sack.

Furious shouts. I jumped up and out of the window and on to the top of the train in no time. Six large rhesus monkeys regarded me with disapproval, before making off with their loot. I followed, jumping from carriage to carriage. The monkeys carrying the loaves began lagging behind. I had almost caught one when we came to some branches overhanging the line. The six of them leaped up and disappeared gibbering into the crown of a giant tree. We’d lost our bread.

We were met at Sealdah Station when we arrived in Calcutta. A truck carried us to a transit camp buried somewhere in the greasy outskirts of the city. They say that Calcutta is a memorial to the unquenchable human spirit of survival. One’s first impression is that one has – as one was expecting to do all one’s life – arrived in Hell, that here is human desperation on a gigantic scale, and that the slums and hinterlands of the Infernal Regions are spreading until they encompass all India. A black water buffalo was calving on an iron bridge over a railway line. Her body lay on the pavement, her legs in the road. All the traffic, including our trucks, ran over her hooves. I looked down as we passed. A calf was emerging from among pulped flesh.

Our camp lay under a railway embankment, surrounded by ferocious slums. Seven Dials in Henry Fielding’s time would have looked the same if you had put it under the grill. The tents which comprised the camp were survivors from the first world war. Everything was indescribably filthy, and flies buzzed everywhere.

It was a refuge for deserters. East of Calcutta, the war machine drew everyone into Burma and the fighting. You either jumped off here or were drawn on. Deserters had no chance of escaping to England or to any neutral country. Their best bet was to hang about in this filthy camp, for years if need be. Some of the N.C.O.s also had deserted, a fiddle was working whereby everyone still managed to draw army pay on which to venture into town once a week, to whore and booze.

One of our detachment nervously asked if we would not stand ‘a better chance’ if we joined the ranks of the deserters.