Poet and teacher Norman MacCaig was a conscientious objector, and between brief spells in Winchester prison and Wormwood Scrubs spent the war farming and gardening. Later in life he wondered if his pacifism had cost him promotion as a teacher. He bore the thought with equanimity.
It was the violence in the world that really made me think about questions of peace and war and pacifism. But that had nothing to do with me becoming a conscientious objector. I keep on repeating: I was just not going to kill people, whether it was in Abyssinia or anywhere else. I just refused to kill people: simple as that …
In the 30s an awful lot of people were certain there was a war coming – particularly, as usual, the writers. They’ve got a nose for such things – the poets and all that, you know, that are looked down on as being illogical, etc. They are not a bit. And we were all perfectly sure the war was coming. But there weren’t writers who influenced me in that way. I wasn’t influenced. My mind was made up – consciously made up when I was about twelve. And I wasn’t influenced by anything whatever, except myself. I sound very aggressive and selfish but that’s the way it was.
Well, I was actually called up in the winter of 1941, because I remember there was heavy snow on the ground that winter. I must have been 31. And I told my parents that I wasn’t going to kill anybody, of course, and I think they thought, ‘This is joking’. None of my relatives, nor even my friends, were pacifist. And my father, who was a wage slave in a chemist’s shop and was an intelligent man with a lot of interests, thought I was just being a cheeky young man when the letter came. He was very disturbed indeed. He lost his temper. But that was only that morning. After six weeks or so it was totally accepted by both my parents. So that I had an easy journey compared with a lot of young men.
At the Tribunal I told them: ‘You can’t put a label on me. I’m not refusing to fight in the war for religious reasons or political reasons or anything like that. It’s just that I refuse to murder people – kill people.’ And I said, ‘I am very willing to join the Royal Army Medical Corps or the Red Cross or the Quakers. But I’m not going to kill anybody.’ And since I’d said I was willing to join the RAMC they couldn’t write me off as a hundred percent conshie. And they put me in the Non-Combatant Corps, a collection of people that nobody seems to have heard about, a Corps made up of people like myself. The NCC were linked to the Pioneer Corps in order to have corporals, sergeants, captains, majors. All the officers and NCOs were Regular army people. But all the privates, as it were, were just like myself.
Well, when I was told to go to Ilfracombe in Devon to the Pioneer Corps, I wrote to the commanding officer and said, ‘I’m no comin. You’ll generally find me home after midnight if you want me.’ Eventually two coppers appeared after midnight and took me up in the black maria to the High Street police station. I think it was a Friday and there was no Police Court on the Saturday. So I stayed in the cell there over the weekend. I didn’t get bail but the policemen were very nice to me. I said, ‘I can’t sleep. Is there anything I can read?’ and a policeman went off and came back with half-a-dozen paperbacks. Then I was brought before the beak in the Police Court on Monday. He said, ‘This is a matter for the army. Just go back into your cell.’
Two soldiers came down from Edinburgh Castle and took me up to the Castle. I was put in jankers – to use the old fashioned word. I was there for several days. Most interesting it was. I was put into a room – it was the guardhouse – with a great lot of soldiers under arrest. They were held there until they were brought before a military court. And most of them, I think, were up for absence without leave, that sort of thing. I was the only pacifist in the place. And they all knew I was a conshie. Because the first question they asked was, ‘What regiment are you in?’
Anyway a big shot – the Commanding Officer in the Castle – came round to inspect us in the guardhouse. Everybody had their beds tidy and their boots in the proper place. I’d just made up mine as if I were at home. In he came. We were all shouted at to ‘Stand to attention!’ They all sprang to attention. And I didn’t. I was sitting on the edge of my bed and I just stayed sitting. I didn’t get up. And the Commanding Officer flushed crimson and started shouting and bawling at me. I said, ‘You don’t realise I’m not in the army. I’m a pacifist. They’ve summoned me to the army but I’m not going because I’m a pacifist. I’ve resigned.’ He nearly exploded. I thought he was going to burst. But I didn’t get up on my feet. The rest of the soldiers hearing a major general or whatever he was being talked to like that, sitting on the end of my bed, ‘Oh, no, I’m not standing up. I’m not in the army’ – wonderful! So what they thought of me in that tough place suddenly rose. I was their lily-white boy after that.
Our lunch in the guardhouse was laid on a table and you just piled in – which I wouldn’t or couldn’t. They just swarmed like bees. And out of that dense mass an arm emerged from this tough guy – and he was a real toughie – handing me something to eat, and this fellow mutters, ‘There ye are, chum.’ To a conshie! Well, this tough guy was on his way to Barlinnie I think for the sixth or seventh time. … And yet it’s he whose arm came out of that mob and handed me my lunch: ‘There you are chum.’ He was a soldier, not a conscientious objector. But again, you see, they had no resentment, no resentment at all.