The yellow strings of laburnum flower had already faded that afternoon when I stood on sentry for the 1st Battalion Albion Street Light Infantry and Mrs Strickland came out of her kitchen door wearing a sack apron and a man’s check cap pinned on her spindly curling rags by a long black hat pin and started shaking mats against the garden fence, not three yards from the tent made of split sacks and old lace curtains where we of the battalion held councils of war before going into battle.
Upstairs across the yard Mrs Rankin was sitting at a window with a bottom like a pumpkin hanging over the sill, huffing energetically on glass already as pure as crystal and then scrupulously polishing the vapour off again with a spotless yellow rag.
The face of Mrs Rankin, smooth and clean as porcelain, looked as if it had been polished too but the face of Mrs Strickland, like her curl-ragged hair, had nothing but greyness in it, a dopey salty greyness at the same time hard, so that the skin looked like scoured pumice stone.
I was only six at the time and still a private; but I thought I detected a smell of parsnip wine in the air. Mangled dust and shreds of coco-matting rose in dense brown clouds as Mrs Strickland beat the decaying mats against the fence but I stood unshakably at attention under the laburnum tree, head up, eyes straight ahead, right hand firmly on the umbrella we were using as a rifle because Jeddah Clarke, our Captain, had the air gun, the only other weapon we possessed.
I knew that if I stood firm on guard and didn’t flinch and saluted properly and challenged people and didn’t let them pass until they gave the password, I might become, in time, a lance-corporal. There was nothing on earth I wanted more than to be a lance-corporal: except perhaps to kill a soldier.
‘I wisht Albie was here,’ Mrs Strickland said. ‘I wisht Albie was here.’
It wasn’t only that morning that her voice had that pumice-dry melancholy in it. It was always there, like the curling rags. Sometimes Mrs Strickland didn’t take out the curling rags until after Bill Strickland came home for his bloater tea at six o’clock and sometimes she didn’t take them out at all.
‘Ain’t got a spare Daisy, gal, I reckon?’
Mrs Strickland, staring with diffused and pleading eyes through the dust she had raised, groping up towards the sumptuous pumpkin of Mrs Rankin on the window sill, ran a dreary hand several times across her brow.
‘Ain’t got nivry one left,’ Mrs Rankin said. ‘You had the last one yisty.’
Daisies were a brand of headache powder guaranteed to refresh and free you from pain in five minutes. Mrs Strickland was taking them all day.
‘Ain’t Bill a-workin’ then?’
‘Bad a-bed. Can’t lift ’isself orf the piller. I wisht Albie was here.’
I knew Albie couldn’t be there. Albie, who was eighteen, a private too like me, was in France, fighting the Germans. I liked Albie; he had a ginger moustache and was my friend. Every other day or so I asked Mrs Strickland if and when Albie was going to become a lance-corporal, but somehow she never seemed to think he was.
‘Ain’t you got nivry one tucked away, gal, somewheer?’
‘Nivry one,’ Mrs Rankin said. ‘Nivry one.’
Despair wrapped Mrs Strickland’s face in a greyer, dustier web of gloom.
‘Me ’ead’s splittin’. It’ll split open. I wisht Albie was here.’
‘Won’t the boy nip and get y’ couple? Ask the boy.’
Mrs Strickland, seeming to become aware of me for the first time, turned to my impassive sentinel figure with eyes of greyest supplication.
‘Nip down the shop and fetch us a coupla Daisies, there’s a good boy. Nip and ask your mother to lend us a thrippenny bit, there’s a good boy. I left me puss upstairs.’
It was funny, my mother always said, how Mrs Strickland was always leaving, losing or mislaying her purse somewhere.
‘And a penn’orth o’ barm too, boy, while you’re down there. I gotta make a mite o’ bread, somehow,’ she called up to Mrs Rankin. ‘Ain’t got a mite in the place, gal. Not so much as a mossel.’
Mrs Rankin, who would presently be hurrying down to the yard to scour and white-wash the kitchen steps to blinding glacier whiteness and who, as my mother said, almost polished the coal before putting it on the fire, merely turned on Mrs Strickland a rounder, blanker, completely unhelpful pumpkin.
I didn’t move either; I was on guard and Jeddah Clarke said you could be shot if you moved on guard.
‘Nip and ask your mother to lend us a thrippenny bit, boy. Tanner if she’s got it, boy——’
‘I can’t go, Mrs Strickland. I’m on sentry,’ I said. ‘I’ll get shot.’
‘Kids everywhere,’ Mrs Strickland said, ‘and nivry one on ’em to run of arrant for you when you want. I wisht Albie was here.’
Mrs Strickland dragged the decaying mats to the middle of the yard. The smell of parsnip wine went with her and she called up to Mrs Rankin:
‘Ain’t got ’arf a loaf I can have for a goin’ on with, gal, I reckon? Jist till the baker gits here? Jist ’arf? Jist the top?’
‘You want one as’ll fit on the bottom I lent you the day afore yisty? or will a fresh ’un do?’
Fiery, tempestuous white curls seemed to fly suddenly out of Mrs Strickland’s mournful, aching head.
‘What’s a matter wi’ y’? Askt y’ a civil question, dint I? Askt y’ civil question. What’s a matter wi’ y’ all of a pop?’
‘Sick on it,’ Mrs Rankin said. ‘About sick to death on it.’
‘Go on, start maungin’! Start yelpin!’
‘Yelpin’, yelpin’? Ain’t got nothing to yelp about, I reckon, have I? When it ain’t bread it’s salt. When it ain’t salt it’s bakin’ powder. Enough to gie y’ the pip. When it ain’t——’
‘Keep on, keep on!’ Mrs Strickland said. ‘It’ll do your fat gullet good. And me with ’im in bed. And the damn war on. And Albie not here.’
Suddenly she dropped the mats, picked up a bucket from the kitchen drain and started beating and rattling it like a war-gong. In a flash Mrs Rankin’s pumpkin darted through the window, dragging the sash down behind it. Behind the crystal glass Mrs Rankin’s face remained palely distorted, mouthing furiously.
Down below in the yard, Mrs Strickland rattled the bucket again, shaking her curling rags, and yelled:
‘Mag, mag. Jaw, jaw. That’s all folks like you are fit for. Mag, jaw, mag, jaw——’
Mrs Rankin’s face, ordinarily so polished and composed, splintered into uncontrollable furies behind the glass as Mrs Strickland started to fill the bucket with water from the stand-pipe in the yard.
In a second Mrs Rankin had the window up with a shrilling squeak of the sash and was half leaping out:
And don’t you start your hanky-pankies. Don’t you start that!—I oiled and polished my door!——’
An arc of white water struck Mrs Rankin’s back door like a breaker. Mrs Rankin slammed down the window and started beating the panes with her fists. Mrs Strickland screamed that she wisht Albie was here, Albie would let some daylight into somebody, and threw the bucket with a crashing roll across the yard.
A moment later a bedroom window shot open in the Strickland house and an unsober chin of black stubble leaned out and bawled:
‘What the bloody ’ell’s going on down there? If you two don’t shut your yawpin’ chops I’ll come down and lay a belt acrosst the pair on y’——’
‘I wisht Albie was here!’ Mrs Strickland said. ‘I wisht Albie was here!’
Drearily she slammed away into the house and after that it was silent for some minutes until suddenly from the street beyond the yard I could hear the inspiring note of war cries. A minute later the first battalion Albion Street Light Infantry came triumphantly pounding down the path between the cabbage patches, led by Jeddah Clarke, carrying the air-gun, Wag Chettle, bearing the standard, a red handkerchief tied to a bean-pole, and Fred Baker, beating a drum he had had for Christmas.
Fred and Jeddah were actually in khaki uniforms. Jeddah, besides the air-gun, wore a bandolier across his chest with real pouches and two clips of spent cartridges; Fred had a peaked khaki cap on, with the badge of the Beds & Bucks Light Infantry on one side and that of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the other. At that time the Fusiliers were billeted in the town and we had an inspired admiration for them because they kept a white goat as mascot. The goat ate anything you gave it, even cigarettes.
What now surprised me about the battalion was not its air of triumph but its size. Usually it was no more than eight strong. Now it was twenty. Those bringing up the rear were even flying a second flag. It was a square of blue-and-white football shirt. I caught the gleam of a second and even a third air-gun and then suddenly Jeddah Clarke, our Captain, raised his air-gun and yelled:
‘Gas Street are on our side! They’re in the battalion! Gas Street have come in with us! Charge!’
We all cheered madly and charged. The little hairs of my neck stuck up in pride, excitement and admiration as we thundered dustily into the summer street outside.
‘Charge!’ we all shouted. ‘Charge! Capture ’em! Charge!’
Heady with thought of battle, we wheeled like thunder into Winchester Street: completely unnoticed by a milk float, two bakers’ carts, a chimney sweep on a bicycle and two women pushing prams.
‘Charge!’ I yelled, and was stunned to hear the blast of a bugle, suddenly blown at my side by a boy named Charley Fletcher, who was in the Lads’ Brigade.
This new note, defiant above the roll of Fred Baker’s drum, had us all in a frenzy of battle just as we surged past a railway dray loading piles of bulky leather outside a factory, where the crane swung out from its fourth storey door like a gallows and dropped its thirty-feet of rippling chain down to the shining hot pavement below.
‘Charge!’ I yelled, bringing up the rear with the umbrella under my arm and pointing it forward as if it had a bayonet in the end, exactly as I had seen in pictures of soldiers charging from the trenches. There was nothing we didn’t know about soldiers and the trenches. We knew all about Vimy Ridge, Ypres, Hill 60 and Verdun too. We had seen them all in pictures.
The voice of our Captain, Jeddah Clarke, tore the air with fresh challenge as we whipped out of Winchester Street into Green’s Alley. Continually Charley Fletcher’s bugle ripped the quiet of the afternoon to shreds with raucous notes that were almost hysterical, rallying both us and the reinforcements of Gas Street, and I wondered suddenly where we were going and where the attack would be made.
Jeddah, yelling, told us all a moment later:
‘Down to The Pit! We’ll git ’em in The Pit!’
My heart went absolutely icy, turned sour and dropped to my stomach.
The Pit was a terrible place. You never went to The Pit. No one ever did. If you did you never came out alive. The people there, who lived in sordid back-to-back hovels with sacks at the windows, captured you, tied you up, locked you in satanic privies and let you suffocate to death. If they didn’t do that they starved you, took away all your clothes and sold you naked in slavery. They were the most awful people in the world. People like Mrs Strickland were respectable by comparison. They were always dirty, drunk and fighting. They were always stinking and they were full of bugs and fleas.
I suddenly wanted to turn back, stand guard in the cabbage patch and dream quietly about being a lance-corporal one day.
‘Charge!’ everyone yelled. ‘Charge! Git the stones ready!’
Out of Green’s Alley we swung on the tide of battle into The Jetty, a narrow track of dried mud and stone. There the triumphant column broke up for a moment or two and we began to hack stones from the dust with the heels of our boots. By this time my legs and knees were shaking: so much so that all I could hack out were two pebbles and the stopper of a broken beer bottle. But Fred Baker, seeing this, took pity on me and armed me with half a brick.
The bugle sounded again, shrill as a cornet.
‘Air-guns in front!’ Jeddah yelled. ‘Git ready when I say charge!’
We thundered on. We had been joined now by a butcher’s boy on a bicycle and for some reason I found myself clinging to his saddle. Suddenly in the excitement the butcher’s boy started pedalling madly and I could hardly keep up with the column as it pounded along.
Less than a minute later we were facing the jaws of The Pit. They were nothing more than a gap between two rows of derelict gas-tarred fences but beyond them I could see the little one-storey hovels with sacks at their windows, the horrible squat brick prisons of outdoor privies and a few dirty flags of shirt on a washing line.
It was impossible for my heart to turn cold a second time; it was frozen stiff already. But the paralysis that kept it stuck at the pit of my stomach now affected my legs and I stopped running.
This, as it turned out, was a purely instinctive reaction. Everyone else had stopped running too.
‘Charge!’ someone yelled and this time it was not our Captain, Jeddah.
The order came from behind us and as we turned in its direction we found ourselves the victims of the oldest of all battle manœuvres. We were being attacked in the rear.
This time my eyes froze. The Pit Brigade stood waiting for us: eight or ten of them, headed by a black-mouthed deaf-mute armed with five-foot two-pronged hoe. Another had an ugly strip of barrel hoop sharpened up like a sword and another a catapult with a black leather sling big enough to hold an egg. He was smoking a cigarette. Two others were manning a two-seater pram armoured with rusty plates of corrugated iron and this, we all realised, was an armament we did not possess. It was the first tank we had encountered.
The deaf-mute started showing his black teeth, gurgling strange cries. He made vigorous deaf-and-dumb signs with his hands and the snarling faces about him jabbered. The entire Pit Brigade, older, bigger, dirtier and better armed than we were, stood ready to attack.
It was too late to think about being a lance-corporal now and a moment later they were on us.
‘Charge!’ everyone shouted from both sides. ‘Charge!’ and we were an instant clash of bricks, stones, catapults, flags, sticks and air-guns that would not fire. Above it all the unearthly voice of the deaf mute gurgled like a throttled man, mouthing black nothings.
I threw my brick. It fell like the legendary sparrow through the air. Someone started to tear the coat off my back and I thrashed madly about me with the umbrella. I could see our two flags rocking ship-mast fashion in the centre of battle and Charley Fletcher using the bugle as a hammer. The two-pronged hoe fell like a claw among us and the armour plates fell off the pram-tank as it ran into Fred Baker and cut his legs, drawing first blood.
Soon we actually had them retreating.
‘We’re the English!’ I heard Jeddah shouting. ‘We’re the English! The Pit are the bloody Germans,’ and this stirring cry of patriotism roused us to fresh thrills of battle frenzy.
‘We’re the English!’ we all yelled. ‘We’re the English!’
Suddenly as if a trap door had opened the Pit Brigade, under sheer weight of pressure, fell backward into the jaws of The Pit, hastily slamming the door behind them as a barricade and leaving outside a single stray soldier armed with a rusty flat iron suspended on a piece of cord and dressed as a sergeant of the Royal Artillery, complete with spurs and puttees.
Cut off from the tide of battle, this soldier gave several rapid and despairing looks about him, dropped the flat iron and bolted like a hare.
‘Prisoner!’ Jeddah yelled. ‘Prisoner! Git him! Take him prisoner!’
In a moment Fred Baker, Charley Fletcher and myself were after him. We caught him at the top of The Jetty. At first he lay on his back and kicked out at us with the spurs, spitting at the same time, but soon I was sitting on his face, Fred Baker on his chest and Charley Fletcher, who was the eldest, on his legs. For a long time he kept trying to spit at us and all the time there was a strong, putrid, stinking, funny smell about him.
We kept him prisoner all afternoon. Then we decided to strip him. While Fred and I sat on his face and chest Charley unrolled the puttees and took off the spurs.
‘You always have spoils of war when you take prisoners,’ Charley explained. ‘Soldiers call it a bit of buckshee.’
We spent some time arguing about how the buckshee should be divided and finally Charley was awarded the puttees, because he was the eldest, and Fred Baker and I each had a spur. Having the spur was even better than being a lance corporal and I couldn’t remember ever having had anything that made me feel more proud.
It was almost evening before Jeddah and the rest of the Battalion got back, fifty strong, from telling of our victory in far places, in Lancaster Street, Rectory Street, Bedford Row, King’s Lane and those parts of the town who could not be expected to hear of our triumph other than by word of mouth and from us.
‘We still got the prisoner, Captain,’ we said. ‘What shall we do with him?’
‘Shoot him,’ Jeddah said.
Orders were orders with Jeddah and we asked if we could have the air-gun.
He handed it over.
‘I leave it to you,’ Jeddah said. He was now wearing a forage cap, three long service stripes, a leather belt and a Welch black flash he had captured. ‘Charge!’
The sound of returning triumph from the fifty-strong battalion had hardly died away before we set to work to shoot the flat-iron boy.
First of all we made him stand up by the fence, among a pile of junk and nettles. By this time we had tied his hands and legs with the cord off the flat-iron and had taken off his shoes so that he found it hard to run. But he still spat at us as he stood waiting to be shot and he still had that funny, sickening smell.
Fred Baker shot him first. The unloaded air-gun made a noise rather like a damp squib. Then Charley Fletcher shot him and the gun made a noise like a damp squib a second time. Then I shot him and as I did so I made a loud, realistic noise that was more like the crack of a bursting paper bag. I aimed between the eyes of the flat-iron boy as I shot and I was very thrilled.
‘Now you’re dead,’ we said to him. ‘Don’t you forget. Don’t you move—you’re dead. You can’t fight no more.’
He didn’t look very dead when we left him but we knew he was. We told the Captain so when we rejoined the battalion in Gas Street, Fred Baker blowing the bugle and wearing the artillery puttees, Charley Fletcher and I taking turns to carry the air-gun and both of us waving a spur.
Jeddah was drunk with victory. ‘Tomorrow we’re goin’ to charge The Rock!’ he said. The Rock was even worse than The Pit but now none of us was appalled and all of us cheered. There was no holding us now.
‘We’ll kill ’em all!’ Jeddah said. ‘We’ll burn ole Wag Saunders at the stake.’ Wag was their Captain. ‘Just like Indians. We’ll win ’em. We ain’t frit. Who are we?’
‘We’re the English!’ we yelled.
It was already growing dark when I trotted home through the streets with my spur. In the back yard there were no lights in Mrs Rankin’s neat, white-silled windows and in Mrs Strickland’s house all the blinds were drawn although all the lights were on.
‘Where have you been all this long time?’ my father said.
He sat alone in the kitchen, facing a cold rice pudding. My father was very fond of cold rice pudding but tonight he did not seem to want it. Under the green gaslight the brown nutmeg skin of it shone unbroken.
‘Fighting with our battalion,’ I said.
I told him how the battle had been won and how I had captured the spur.
‘That spur doesn’t belong to you,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning you must take it back.’
I felt sick with disappointment and at the way grown-up people didn’t understand you.
‘Can I keep it just for tonight?’
‘Just for tonight,’ he said. ‘But you must take it back tomorrow.’
Then I remembered something and I told him how the boy I’d got it from was dead.
‘How is that?’ he said. ‘Dead?’
‘We shot him.’
‘Oh! I see,’ he said. ‘Well: tomorrow you go and find the dead boy and give him back his spur.’
Looking round the kitchen I now remembered my mother and asked where she was.
‘She’s with Mrs Strickland,’ my father said. ‘Mrs Rankin’s with her too. I expect you noticed that all the blinds were drawn?’
I said I had noticed and did it mean that someone was dead?
‘It’s your friend—your friend Albie’s not going to come back,’ my father said.
After that my father didn’t seem to want to speak very much and I said:
‘Could I go and play in the tent until mother comes home?’
‘You can go and play in the tent,’ he said.
‘With a candle?’ I said. ‘It’s dark now outside.’
‘Take a candle if you like,’ he said.
I took a candle and sat in the tent all by myself, looking at my spur. It was shaped something like a handcuff to which was attached a silver star. The candlelight shone down on the spur with wonderful brilliance and as I looked at it I remembered the voices of Mrs Strickland and Mrs Rankin squabbling with bitterness over a loaf of bread in the afternoon and how Mrs Strickland wisht that Albie would come back, and now I listened again for their voices coming from the outer darkness but all I could hear was the voice from the afternoon:
‘I wisht Albie was here. I wisht Albie was here.’
There is nothing much you can do with a solitary candle and a single spur. The spur can only shine like silver and the candlelight with a black vein in the heart of it.
Early next morning I took the spur back to The Pit. I ran all the way there and I was glad that no one saw me. The sun was coming up over the gas-tarred fences, the little hovels, the privies and the washing lines and all I did was to lay the spur on a stone in the sunlight, hoping that someone would come and find it there.
I ran all the way home, too, as hard as I could: afraid of the enemy we had conquered and the soldier I had killed.