Pale Shadow of Science

‘I’d rather die in the bloody jungle than rot here,’ said Monks, with his usual solid sense.

After two days, we reported to Howrah station, in order to continue our journey to Dibrugarh and 36 Div. The RTO at Howrah mysteriously took two of our number away, for posting elsewhere. No explanations were given. Nine of us were left, with damaged morale.

The line from Howrah northwards had come under American administration. American troops were on the train, noisy, casual, well-dressed. They had attached a canteen, which they called the caboose. Every fifty miles or so, the train would stop in the middle of nowhere, and anyone who wanted could collect a mug of coffee from the caboose. We were hospitably invited to do the same. The coffee was excellent. But we simply could not understand the Yanks and their boyish excitement at going to war. One of them, however, presented me with a copy of AstoundingScienceFiction, which he had finished reading.

Our excitement increased as we neared Dibrugarh. What a welcome we would get! The railway ran along the south bank of the wide Bramaputra. After many changes of train and mysterious delays, we reached Tinsukia, the railhead. No one was there to meet us. The RTOs had erred.

We waited on the station, kit drawn up round us. Dusk thickened on the plain. In the distance, clear, aloof, still in sunlight, stood the majestic range of the Himalayas, with Tibet beyond. Their snow-crowned heights slowly turned pink with sunset.

A three-tonner rolled up. We climbed aboard and went bumping into the dark. The driver was mad and did his best to run down any dogs which crossed the road. He succeeded twice. All round us was miserable secondary growth, slum jungle.

We arrived at the Dibrugarh camp at three in the morning. A banner over a wooden sentry post announced that we had made contact at last with the British 36th Division. They were about to go into action north-eastwards, towards the River Salween, to strengthen Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s Burma Road to Chungking, the wartime Chinese capital.

A corporal was woken. He had no knowledge of us. There was nowhere for us. They did not need reinforcements. We would have to sleep in the mess, on the mess tables, and someone would sort out the balls-up in the morning. No, there was no grub. Not at four in the morning, mate. What did we think they were, a bloody hotel?

The cooks woke us at six. We sat around on our kitbags for some while.

The camp was run on a piratical basis by a captain and two senior NCOs. They were extremely nasty. We stood in the sun and were dressed down by one NCO. for being there at all. Meanwhile, the captain was hatching a simple plot.

Our proper allowance of kit was, as I recall, 95 lbs. It included smart tropical dress uniform. The captain announced that, as we were now in an active service zone, our kit must be reduced to 60 lbs. We had ten minutes to get down to regulation weight.

Our dress uniforms and dress hats went. Books went. I was left with only a World Classics Palgrave’s GoldenTreasury and the copy of AstoundingScienceFiction. Life in the army was full of abandoned things; we adopted an Urdu word for it, ‘pegdo.’ Our pegdoed kit, books, uniforms, musical instruments, had to be piled up at the door of the quartermaster’s stores.

We were informed that a truck would come immediately and we would be shipped back to the RTO at Howrah. I took action I could hardly believe myself to be doing; without telling the others, I stepped into the captain’s tent, saluted, and volunteered to go to Chungking.

‘Who are you to volunteer? You’re fresh out from England, haven’t even got your knees brown.’

‘I passed first class as a 19 and 22 set operator, sir. And can work a line instrument.’

‘I didn’t ask you that. I asked you what category you were. Are you A1?’

‘No, sir, I’m A2, sir. But that’s only because of my specs. I can see perfectly well with them on. I’ve had commando training, sir.’

‘A2s are no use to us. This is a real fighting division. Get out. Dismiss.’

My old dream of getting to China had triumphed over a sensible concern to stay with my mates. I read every word I could find on Chungking, the muddy, isolated much-bombed capital of Chiang Kai-shek. I longed for its Chinese squalor. Throughout my time in the East, I kept volunteering for China; Hong Kong was the nearest I got.

Before the three-tonner bumped us out of the compound, we had the mortification of seeing the captain and his thugs descend on our pegdoed treasures and begin to divvy them up.

Back to Tinsukia. There, hanging about the sidings waiting for a train, Monks and I were accosted by an ancient Indian and a small boy. The old man would sing to us, good British songs, sir, for only one rupee. As it happened, we had only two rupees in small change between us. We gave him half a rupee and he began to sing, accompanied by the small boy on a flute, a garbled version of ‘Tipperary.’

It’s a long long the Tipperarip,

It’s a way ago.

It’s a long long the Tipperarip,

To the Swedish, ah no.

Go try to pick a lilly fair

Well let’s scare …

Monks and I stood among the maze of lines and roared with laughter. We pressed more money on the old boy, forcing him to sing his song again. His words grew wilder. He was overjoyed by his success, bewildered by his reception. He went on singing until we had given him our last anna and his metre ran out. Long after, three years later in Sumatra, Monks and I could make each other laugh just by singing in a creaking nasal voice, ‘It’s a long long the Tipperarip.’

We never got back to Calcutta. At Gauhati, on the Bramaputra, we were caught by another RTO, and directed to the 2nd British Division. This entailed getting a train of a different gauge, heading eastwards. This time, there was no escaping our fate. We were heading for Dimapur, Kohima, and the Jap-infested fastnesses of Burma.

At Dimapur, we de-trained. We were not expected. We checked into a fearsome camp, and one or two of us were immediately collared for fatigues.

This consisted of climbing into the cargo hold of a Dakota aircraft and sitting among the stores, hanging on grimly as the plane took off, to fly low over the hills of Nagaland and drop supplies to British and Indian troops. When a flying type with a clipboard shouted ‘Now,’ our job was to boot supplies put of the open door of the aircraft as it banked over the target. Such was my first experience of flying.

The next morning, a lorry arrived at the camp and the nine of us climbed in. We were driven eighty miles along the famous Dimapur Road. The road climbed steadily, twisting and turning to follow the convolutions of the mountainside. Sunlight and shade swung about our heads. Parts of the road were still being built or rebuilt. Over the sheer drop, we could see in the valley below burnt out carcasses of trucks which had been carelessly driven.

We reached Milestone 81 rather pale and shaky, and were assigned officially to the British 2nd Division. Our sixteen-day journey was over. A journey into war lay ahead.

Old Bessie (#ulink_8849ef02-3a31-56a1-88d5-0800613af871)

THIS IS A TRUE STORY, AND A GHOST STORY. YET I DON’T believe it myself.

What is a true story? It is a tale whose lies you cannot detect.

What is a ghost story? It is this – and with it comes entangled much of my life.

Earlier this year, I had the responsibility for carrying out the last wishes of my grandfather’s second wife. That is to say, of my step-grandmother whom I called (for simplicity and other reasons) my Aunt. She died in the spring, almost fifty years after my grandfather, at the age of ninety-five.

My Aunt Dorothy was the reason – or one of them, for life is never that simple – why our family broke up in a spectacular way. My grandfather was a strong-willed, self-made man, to whom his descendants owe a great debt. When he took a young second wife at the age of seventy, everyone was scandalized. In those days, in a country town in the mid-thirties, such a step was regarded as little short of treasonable. Particularly by a family which stood to lose financially by the union.

As a child, and as an adult, I loved my Aunt. She was among the best people I ever knew. I was glad to honour her wish to be laid to rest beside my grandfather’s bones, although to do that entailed a journey half across England to the dark dull heart of Norfolk.

Few people attended the funeral service. I spoke a short encomium over the grave. Then our little party climbed back into the cars to head for the only presentable hotel, where I was standing everyone lunch. I had reached that time in life, that position in the family, where it was taken for granted I would provide. How different from when I had lived as a boy in this miserable little town, when I was neglected and allowed to run wild.

On the way to the hotel, my wife dropped me by the council offices. The rest of the party went on their way while I went to pay the gravediggers’ fees.

Afterwards, on a whim, I walked to see the house where we had lived before we left the town in disgrace. The house stood down St Withburga Lane and was in fact called Withburga House. It faced across to the churchyard and to the church with its square tower.

There was the house still, much altered, covered with a thick stucco, and half the size I remembered it. It was now the HQ of the Brecklands District Council, or some such absurd name. The house and I confronted each other, to see how we had fared over forty years. Its fate was no worse than mine. We both survived, in our fashion.

To be truthful, I had never liked the house. I had been frightened there, at a tender age. This was where my lifelong habit of insomnia began, in the bedroom overlooking the old graves.

Our garage had been knocked down to allow for a small yard at the side. I walked round and looked over the high wooden gate into our old walled garden.

It was just as it had been, that summer we left. The terrace by the house, the old wash-room, converted into a summerhouse, the central flowerbed planted with annuals, the rustic work, the heavy laburnum at the far end, the lawn. Everything maintained.

My father made that garden. When we bought Withburga, it had been in a state of decay. Restoration had been needed inside, while the garden, a wilderness, had had to be restarted from scratch. My father had thrown himself into the work with his usual energy, digging, sowing, planting, and mixing concrete for paving and to support rustic pergolas. Staring over the gate, back into the past, I could imagine him still at work there, doing the sort of thing he liked best.

The front door of the house had been blocked off. One entered by the side, where once there had been no door. All was quiet. I wandered down a bare corridor. It was chill, unwelcoming. I saw that our old rooms had been partitioned into cubicles. Here was the kitchen, a kitchen no more. Here was our breakfast room, where the sun once filtered in on to the tablecloth, the china, the bowl of stewed apple. Here my sister’s dolls house had stood, one memorable Christmas … now there were instead three little rooms, each with a chair and a pencil on a string.

At the far end of the corridor was one of those hatches which has a button-bell outside it, against which a notice says ‘Push for Attention’; when the bell is pushed, it calls forth a girl who opens the hatch and says ‘Yes?’ With a sense of unreality, I pushed the bell. The hatch opened, and a girl said yes.