A Soldier Erect: or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy

It seemed that my young man was having an argument with the people in the room – for it was a room, and the girl was looking down at me between the bannisters of a wooden staircase. In the delay, she and I stared across at each other.

As we stood there, a wash of brilliance swept round the court outside. It picked out the senile old men and the doomed tree, then lost them in shadow again. Pillars, vines, decaying houses, stable – then the beams of light swung and caught me on the threshold of the room. I turned. As I did so, my young man pushed me from behind. I was outside, in the court again, and felt the door slammed behind me. I heard a bolt clatter home. Two MPs with truncheons jumped out of their jeep and ran towards me.

It counted in my favour that I made no attempt to escape or struggle. As they escorted me towards the jeep, my only concern was to protect the rolled picture of Hanuman, still clutched in my hand.

Out of Bounds! It was one of those childish phrases that made the Army seem like public school. With their arbitrary rules and the cunning mixture of moral impositions and brute force which constituted authority, the two institutions were much alike: although there was marginally more liberty and less swearing in the Army.

I told the Redcaps that I had not realized I was out of bounds. They were openly contemptuous and disbelieving – that was their profession. They demanded to look at Hanuman. I unrolled the poster and let them sneer at it. Even when I said it had only cost me ten annas, they remained disdainful.

My salvation was that I was fresh to India. My knees weren’t brown. I had got no service in. Otherwise my feet would not have touched. They would have had my guts for garters. They had it in for me now. If they ever found me in the brothel area again, I would never know what hit me. I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

After these admonitions, to which I responded by standing more and more rigidly to attention, the MPs drove me through town and back to the barrack gate. They studied me in silent commiseration as I climbed out and made my way back past the guardroom towards ‘A’ Block.

The bastards! Back in the barrack-room, I was too brassed off to speak to anyone, or to do anything more than climb into bed and get my head under my mosquito net. We were off to Burma soon – precious little chance we would have of getting a woman there. We should get ourselves fucking killed and that was all. What right did the Army have to keep me away from that lovely little bibi on the stairs?

It was impossible not to conjure up her face, looking like voluptuousness itself between the bars. Under the blankets, my damned thing rose, the quick-couraged MP-defier. When I clutched its sturdy shaft and tried to think what it would be like to push it up the imagined vulva of that half-imaginary girl, the necessity for a quick rub overcame me. Each stroke was to be the last but, Christ, what else was there in life? Although I grudged the old five-fingered widow her easy task, there was a certain relief in feeling the blobs of spunk cut a swathe over chest and stomach.

In those days, it was easier to come than think.

Next morning before parade, I stuck the crumpled picture of the monkey god on the wall beside the bed, next to the pin-ups of Ida Lupino and Jinx Falkenberg.

‘You know, Stubby, mate, I’m sure the old sweats as knows India are dead right about what they say about women, like,’ Geordie said after parade, waving his hands and his Adam’s apple in distress at having to say something to me I might not like.

‘What do they say, Geordie?’ He had taken care to get me on one side to speak. Word that the MPs had brought me home had evidently seeped through to him.

‘Well, you know same as I do – that you can get into trouble, like, if you sort of go with a pusher, like …’

‘Come on, Geordie, you were telling us down in the bazaar that you saw a bit of crumpet you fancied.’

‘Oh, I know, but I didn’t really mean that. I mean, I wouldn’t really … I mean, we do seem to have everything in barracks as we could want, don’t us, like? I mean, quite apart from all the parading and training. They say there’s two games of football a week. Well, two or three, I think the notice said. We can work up a sweat, you know, me on inside right and you like on the wing, just like at Aldershot …’

‘Sure, and then guard-duty at night. Oh, it’s a full life okay, a great life if you don’t weaken. You aren’t trying to tell me I ought to keep myself morally pure, are you?’

‘No, no, it’s hard to explain. You know I don’t want to get at you, but you are my mate, after all, Stubby. I just mean that even without pushers around, it’s a pretty full life …’

Perhaps he ran out of words. Perhaps he saw the look on my face.

‘You think I’m a bit of a cunt, Stubby, don’t you? Be honest now!’

‘’Course I don’t, mucker! …’

Poor old Geordie! There was a lot in what he said. Our regimented life was designed to be sufficient in itself. And he hadn’t even mentioned our two-day exercises, when we ran and crawled round Central Provinces as we once had round Arras and Somerset …

This rigorous existence was not enough. Every situation generates its legends, and our legend was Burma. We were attuned to every word about it, to every whisper that trickled through, just as we were to messages from that other distant country of sexuality.

Burma was hundreds of miles away from Kanchapur. Mandalay was as distant from us as Toronto from Miami or London from Kiev, and the route there lay across mountain chains and enormous rivers; but our ears were turned in that direction. At this time, late in 1943, the Japanese occupied almost all of Burma and were moving towards Assam. They still had the legend of invincibility round them, which the Chindits were only just denting. They were the fearsome yellow tribes who survived in jungles where nobody else could.

Kanchapur had its share of broken-down old men (as they seemed then – I suppose they would be in their mid-thirties) who had come through operations with Wingate, or through 6 Brigade’s attack on Akyab earlier in the year. From these men, stories of terror came.

‘You don’t want to listen to them,’ Charley Cox said. ‘Now Mountbatten’s arrived, things are going to be different out here. The British have never been permanently beaten yet. That’s how we won our Empire. Ain’t that right, Dusty?’

Miller, who was the platoon funny man, assumed a blasé officer’s voice to say, ‘You’re bally right, Lance-Corporal Cox. We’ll give these little yellow bath-tubs what for, eh, what?’

‘There’s more men out here now to fight the Japs, you see,’ Charley explained.

The Fourteenth Army – in which the Mendips found themselves – was gathering strength and preparing to knock the Japs right out of Burma. But a feeling of misgiving persisted. The Russians were beating back the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Americans were beating back the Japs in the Pacific, our own Eighth Army were pushing up Italy – Nelson was with them – and the Italians had chucked it in and come in on our side. The war in Europe looked as if it would be over one day. The war in South-East Asia had hardly begun.

Between the route marches, the football games, the evenings in the canteen, were spaces with which the Army could not cope. In those intervals, whispers of combined operations and landings on the hellish Burmese coast worked in us like yeast.

The other ferment I was able to deal with personally.

It happened that, two or three days after the MPs ran me back to barracks, No. 2 Platoon was on riot exercise. As usual, there were rice famines in parts of India, and rioting against the British in some of the big cities, Indore included. Riot exercise was a matter of marching about in Kanchapur, not letting the Wogs into the main street, and so on. We were equipped with pick helves for the purpose.

In the crowd, I saw the quiet young man who had led me to the girl. He was clutching a book under his arm. Either he did not see me or did not recognize me, but I took the sight of him as a guarantee that the girl – possibly his sister – was still available. For the rest of the day I could not stop thinking of her. Oh, she was beautiful! It was so much more than a fuck I wanted! To pour my heart out – my ambitions – my dreams … and to hear the dreams of that exotic creature!

I was determined to have it in before we left Kanchapur. Neither MPs nor Geordie should stop me. That evening, I had a shower, changed into a freshly dhobied suit of jungle greens, and buzzed off down to the bazaar on my own. The sky was purple, with bars of gold at the horizon, and the fruit-bats were stirring in the tallest jacarandas. I headed for where the tonga-wallahs idly waited.

The quiet young man was not on duty yet. Very well, then I would find my own way to my beloved! This time I would make bloody sure the Redcaps did not nab me. I slipped behind the trees and down the side lane, and at once a different awareness overcame me. No longer was I alone and lonely, a mere debased squaddie; my life was the stuff of romance and I walked in exotic and oriental paths to meet my sumptuous love!

There again was that other crowded street, packed with people, filled with delicious smells. Now to find that little back court! And if I didn’t, there must be plenty of adventure in other courts, so – so fecund was life and circumstance here. Fecund! My God, yes, the place was fecund, so fecund it was impossible to understand how everyone did not respond to it! I thought briefly, with contempt, of the constipated little CO with his silly speech about being morally pure. The sod was dead from the balls up!

After only one wrong turning, I found myself standing again in the amazing courtyard, where the twisted tree died against the twisted houses. Which door? Of course, the candle and the flower! The candle burned there within its niche, the blossom was fresh: a white flower lying on its side, without a stem. In an hour, it would be withered.

I knocked on the door. I was almost shitting myself. Perhaps nobody would come. A bolt clanked, the door opened slightly. A grunt within. The door closed again. I stood there. It opened again, again closed. Could they be going to phone the cops? Phone? In this dump!

I had half made up my mind to leave when a chiko emerged from the door. It was the kid who had run on ahead last time I was here.

‘You like lady, Johnny?’

‘Yes – the one I saw the other night!’

‘Police, Johnny. Many trouble, police come, many hit, all cry!’ He went through a pantomime suggesting that the Battle of Bannockburn had been fought on his doorstep.

‘The police didn’t see me coming here, I promise. Where’s the bibi?’

‘Thirty rupee, Johnny.’ He held out his hand.

‘Thirty rupee – you’re off your fucking head, Johnny! Look, me no pips, no stripes, just BOR, malum? Poor man!’

‘You rich man! Give thirty rupee, get lady.’ He might not speak English as well as his big brother, but he was a tough little sod in argument. Eventually I knocked him down to ten rupees for a short time. Only when he had the notes in his hand did he let me through the door. When we were inside, he bolted it behind us.

Two oil lights were burning on the floor, beside an old man who sat in a ragged turban nursing a hen. A stick lay beside him. Hen and man regarded me with mistrustful eyes as the boy, with a muttered word, took up one of the lamps and moved to the stairs.

I looked about me. What a ruinous place it was! Bare as a barn! A small door at the foot of the stairs had a grill in it. I peered through the grill. I was staring into the interior of a dim-lit shop. Perhaps it was a tailor’s of sorts, for bundles of fabrics stood on the stairs, impeding our progress. I looked eagerly ahead, tripping up as I climbed.

The boy led me to a door and stopped.

‘Lady in here, Johnny.’