chapter one

Return Journey

I

There was no difficulty about the journey: I might just as well have been setting forth on an ordinary shopping expedition to the town. The bus trundled along the valley, through the familiar villages; it was an afternoon in mid-October, warm and sunlit still, but with an autumnal tang in the air. The light lay softly across the stubble fields, touching the far woods to a subdued brilliance of old gold; in the cottage gardens Michaelmas daisies and the last, frost-bitten asters smouldered like damp embers.

Between Elham and Lyminge there was a slight delay: a flock of sheep crowded the narrow road, their pullulating, woolly bodies milling helplessly between the hedges. The bus hooted, the boy in charge of the sheep scuttled to and fro, vainly attempting to divert this slow, ponderous flow of animate mutton. But the road was narrow, and the bus filled it; we crawled onward, at the sheep’s pace, an ineffectual juggernaut – the driver tootling still, for appearance’s sake, on his horn, the sheep baa-ing in melancholy chorus: it was we, not they (one felt), who were being led to the sacrifice.

‘Disgraceful,’ said a man in the next seat to me. ‘They want to get organized, that’s what they want.’ A slick, bumptious townee, he had no patience with country ways – they needed ‘organizing’: but the woolly, baa-ing mass refused to be organized, we could only crawl helplessly in its wake. There were still moments (I thought) when Nature could interrupt the March of Progress.

At last the lane broadened, the sheep were driven on to the grass verge, and we drove on. The bus, topping the hill above Beach-borough, began to descend through the golden ruins of the beech-woods. The town lay below – a jumble of red and grey roofs smudged with chimney smoke and sea-mist. The hills guarded it, as ever, to the north: but their shapes were changed now, the smooth slopes were broken up by tank-traps and gunsites, the Bee Orchid and the Late Spider had become rare . . . Beyond the town lay the sea: a wall of tarnished silver against the bright, clear sky.

I left the bus at the squalid beginnings of Cheriton: a red suburb plastered with advertisements, fringing the wide, wind-swept plateau of the camp. I walked down Risborough Lane: canteens, ‘soldiers’ homes’, outlying hutments – a no-man’s-land which was still, technically, an outpost of ‘Civvy street’, but tainted, already, with the very smell of soldiering.

A few swaddies passed: all bullshitted up for the pictures or a piss-up in the town. I didn’t know where the Company was quartered, and had to ask the way; but nobody else seemed to know either. I reached the confines of the camp, and took a path across open fields; a football-match was in progress: red and yellow jerseys mingling and shifting under the bright light, like figures in a ballet. Shouts and laughter came faintly across the fields: a single bugle sounded, remotely from somewhere beyond the garrison church.

More soldiers passed me: there were no civvies now – I had crossed the frontier, this was a soldiers’ land. I asked the way again, and walked on – past the garrison church, towards the further boundaries of the camp and the cliffs above Sandgate.

When at last I found the company buildings, no one seemed to be about. I remembered the place, as one remembers something in a dream; it had once formed part of the old military hospital. Years ago, before the war, I had visited a friend of my brother’s, Jack Fernside-Speed, who had been in hospital with a broken leg . . . I followed an arrow which pointed to the orderly-room, knocked at the door and went in. A clerk sat at the table, struggling with a new typewriter ribbon; he looked browned-off. For a moment or two he didn’t even bother to look up; then he raised his head and glanced at me with a faintly questioning air.

‘You the bloke what’s re-enlisted?’ he asked.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Cor, you must be crackers,’ he said.

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ I replied.

The clerk’s comment hadn’t surprised me: it was exactly what I had been expecting. ‘What do I do?’ I asked.

‘You better see the RSM – only he’s gone to his tea, now, so you’ll have to hang on a bit . . . Tell you what, you could have some tea yourself, if you like.’

I said I thought some tea would be nice, only I hadn’t any eating-irons yet, and I didn’t know where the mess was.

‘OK, I’ll fix you up in a jiffy – I’m just waiting for my mate to relieve me. Then you can borrow his eating-irons, and I’ll take you down.’ He paused, and once again eyed me with a wondering curiosity.

‘What you do it for?’ he inquired. ‘Trouble at home, like?’

I said no, I hadn’t had any trouble at home. I just wanted a job.

‘But why choose the soddin’ Army?’

I said I didn’t think Civvy Street was so good nowadays.

‘Cor, they won’t get me back, once I’m out . . . What job was you on before, then?’

I explained that I was a writer.

‘A sort of journalist,’ I added, for the word ‘writer’ plainly hadn’t registered. Probably I’d have been ‘directed’ into a coal mine, I said, if I hadn’t done something about it.

‘One of the spivs, eh?’ said the clerk, eyeing me, for the first time, with something like respect.

‘Just a drone, I expect,’ I said.

‘How long you been out, then?’ he asked.

‘Two years – just upon.’ I added, with a bit of swank, that I’d got five and a half year’s service in. The clerk, a boy of eighteen just conscripted, looked at me rather as a primitive tribesman might look at a sacred lunatic; his horror mingled with a certain superstitious awe.

‘Cor, you must like the Army,’ he muttered.

‘I suppose in a way, I do,’ I agreed.

He shook his head: sacred lunatics were something quite outside his orbit.

‘Like to have a look at the paper?’ he asked, and pushed over a copy of the Daily Mirror, well thumbed and folded very small.

I read ‘Belinda’ and ‘Buck Ryan’, and some paragraphs about Bruce Woodcock. Presently the clerk’s relief arrived, I borrowed his eating-irons, and we went down to tea. It was good – fish and chips, well cooked and plenty of it. In my rôle of sacred lunatic I was treated with a certain politeness – almost as a sort of valuable pet. The unit seemed, from what I could gather, fairly cushy; I was lucky not to have been posted to Boyce Barracks, the Regimental Depot at Crookham.

After tea I was interviewed by the RSM.

‘CO’s inspection tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Stand-to-your-bed at oh-eight-fifteen. Ordinary days you parade on the square at oh-eight-thirty . . . You better draw some webbing and get it blancoed . . . What was your trade before – STO, eh? Well, you’ll have to have a trade-test, of course – we’ll send you to Woolwich for that . . . All right, then – that’ll be all.’

I came smartly to attention: it felt odd doing it in civvies. At the store, I drew a very incomplete kit: they were short of nearly everything. The corporal, who seemed nice, took me up to the barrack-rooms and found me a bed. I took off my civvies and put on the rough Angola shirt and battle-dress trousers. Then I went out to the Ablutions and started to blanco my webbing. The chap in the next bed to mine offered to give me a hand.

‘You struck unlucky, coming on a Tuesday,’ he said. ‘Still, the CO’s pretty cushy – as long as you’ve got your webbing laid out all right, that’s all he’s worried about.’

While my webbing dried I sewed the divisional flashes and medal-ribbons on to my tunic. The row of five ribbons looked, I thought, rather grand. I looked at the Italy star and remembered, suddenly, a farmhouse in the Abruzzi, the padrone pouring out wine from a big fiasca, and the signora cutting up the long strips of pasta at the table. But that had been a different Army . . . In the barrack-room, the wireless was tuned in to the Light Programme: a talk for housewives on how to cook dried cod. Not surprisingly, nobody was listening to it; most of the room’s occupants were getting ready to go out. Some were high-polishing their boots; a few lay back on their bed-cots, reading the Mirror or Picture Post. The chap next to me showed me the regulation way of laying out webbing: he was a Cockney, with a snouty face and a mop of black hair plastered down with grease; he seemed friendly, and showed no undue surprise at my having re-enlisted.

‘You stayin’ in tonight, or coming out to the pictures?’ he asked. ‘There’s a smashing one at the Odeon – Dorothy Lamour.’

I thanked him, and said I thought I’d stay in tonight. Presently he went out: the barrack-room by now was almost empty. I had a wash, made my bed down, and lay back with my head against my kit-bag, reading an old number of Picture Post.

The wireless droned out a swing-tune; from the open window a cool wind, smelling of the sea, played over my bare arms and chest. I felt relaxed, free of responsibility, happy; I was back in the Army.

II

Reveillé was at six: but it wasn’t like the reveillés I remembered. There was none of the shouting, none of the time-honoured cracks: ‘Wakey-wakey, rise-and-shine, show a leg there’; the night orderly-sergeant simply stamped into the barrack-room, switched on the lights and the wireless, and stamped out again. The wireless was tuned in, full-blast, to the American Forces Network: a deafening blare of swing music, interspersed with announcements in the jaunty, get-together-boys voice of the campus. Reveillé had become an impersonal, mechanical affair, ‘laid on’ like gas or tap-water and with an American accent.

It seemed impossible that anybody should continue to sleep through such a din; yet most of the room’s occupants showed no signs of stirring. Conscripts, for the most part, of nineteen or twenty, they belonged to a generation which had been ‘conditioned’ into an almost complete insensibility to noise. Reared in a quieter age, I did not share their immunity; soon I tumbled out of bed and made for the Ablutions. There were a dozen washbasins between fifty-odd men: I had done well to come early. Soon there was a crowd: yawning, tousled, crapulous, they began to queue up for the basins; in the dim light their faces seemed reduced to a mere basic essence of maleness, indistinguishable one from another as a crowd of Japs or Eskimos. The water was icy, stinging the bed-warm flesh like the lash of a whip; jostled by my neighbours, I splashed my face and neck, and began to feel better. Individuals emerged, already half-familiar, from the vague, indeterminate mass of faces: my Cockney friend of the night before (‘Wotcher mate, how yer liking it?’); a thin young man with straw-coloured hair; a boy with acne scars on his neck. Someone let a fart; there were laughs and cat-calls; one of the blokes began to sing – crooning, nasally, with a Yankee accent. It was, for me, a kind of rite of re-initiation – this crude, naked mass-encounter in the callow morning light. I hated it; yet it was a part of the life I had chosen. This first morning would be the worst: in a few days this frieze of blurred, formless countenances would have clicked into focus, separated itself into significant units – people I liked or didn’t like, who bored me or made me laugh.

Back in the barrack-room, I folded my blankets, gave a rub to my brasses, swept my bed-space. The unit certainly seemed pretty cushy: there was no early roll-call parade. Once again I felt glad that I hadn’t been sent to the Depot: Shorncliffe was a holding company for the Area; sooner or later – when I had had a trade-test at Woolwich – I should be posted; but I wasn’t in any hurry to go; I lived, after all, only fifteen miles away.

The barrack-room windows looked out, over the cliff-tops, to the sea; somewhere out there, in the pale, diffused October sunlight, was Dungeness; below the cliff lay Seabrook and the coast-road to Hythe. The sea-wind, salt and chilly, blew in through a broken pane behind my bed; I stuck a piece of cardboard in the gap and, looking across the bay, had a sudden sense of homecoming: the view from the barrack-room was that upon which, in childhood, I had looked from the windows of my nursery.

Breakfast: rashers and mashed potatoes, and steaming mugs of tea. There was still a whole hour, before the CO’s inspection, to tidy up the barrack-room. I arranged my webbing according to pattern; gave my new boots another polish; dusted the back of my bed and the top of my locker. Presently the orderly-sergeant called ‘stand to your beds’. The CO came in, followed by the sergeant-major; when he reached my bed-space he said: ‘Is this the new enlistment?’ as though I were a parcel which had arrived by the morning post. The sergeant-major said: ‘Yes-sir-short-service-engagement-of-three-years,’ all in one breath. The CO looked at my medal-ribbons, then at my boots, then under my bed; and passed on.

‘Report to my office after the parade,’ said the sergeant-major.

The Cockney in the next bed-space was checked for dirty webbing.

‘No blanco in the store, sir.’

‘Is that right, sergeant-major?’

‘New consignment came in yesterday, sir.’

‘Put him on a charge.’

After that, the CO went round the room rather quickly, looking bored; there were no more charges.

When we were dismissed I reported to the sergeant-major’s room.

‘Report in half-an-hour outside the CO’s office,’ he said.

I hung about for half-an-hour in the barrack-room; then I went back to the main building. I waited another half-hour. Presently the sergeant-major came past and looked at me vaguely, as though he remembered seeing me before somewhere.

‘Your name Brooke?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Better go and have your Naafi-break. Come back in half-an-hour.’

I went over to the cookhouse, and drank a mug of tea. Then I went back and waited outside the CO’s office. Presently the RSM came back.

‘You the new enlistment?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All right, come back in twenty minutes.’

I went back to the barrack-room and gave my boots another brush-up; then I returned punctually to the office. This time the RSM was waiting outside.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ he said angrily. ‘All right, hang on outside till I call you in.’

I hung on for another quarter of an hour; then the RSM opened the door and bawled ‘Private Brooke!’

I marched in, came smartly to attention, and saluted.

‘Private Brooke?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ve re-enlisted for a short-service engagement, eh?’

‘Yes, sir – three years.’

‘What was your job in civilian life?’

‘Journalist, sir.’

‘H’m – journalist, eh? What sort of papers did you write for?’

My mind went suddenly blank: I wasn’t prepared for this. There was nothing for it – I should have to tell the truth.

‘Horizon, New Writing and The Nineteenth Century,’ I said, devoutly hoping that he hadn’t heard of any of them.

As it happened he hadn’t: so far, at least, as one could judge from his expression.

‘Not much future in it, eh?’ he asked.

‘No, sir.’

Then he asked me about my former Army trade, I should have to have a trade-test, he said; till then, they could only give me five bob a day.

‘But you’ll get back-pay as from enlistment, when it comes through from Records,’ he added, consolingly. Luckily I had just been paid a sixty-pound advance on a novel; but it didn’t, at that moment, seem necessary to say so.

‘H’m, yes – well, we’ll have to find you a job . . . You seem to be an educated sort of bloke . . . Where were you thinking of putting him, sergeant-major?’

‘They want someone in the store, sir.’

‘All right, then – he’d better work there for the present. All right, er –’ (he looked down at a note on the desk in front of him). ‘All right, Brooke.’

I was marched out.

‘Report to Corporal Bradnum in the store,’ said the sergeant-major.

I reported to Corporal Bradnum. He was drinking a belated mug of Naafi tea with his mate.

‘There’s a drop left, if you’d like it,’ he said.

We sat and smoked for half-an-hour till the tea was finished.

‘What’s to do?’ I said.

‘F— all, at the moment. There’s a pile of eleven-fifty-sevens wants checking sometime, but that’ll do after dinner,’

‘I’m easy,’ I said.

Corporal Bradnum settled down to the Daily Mirror crossword; his mate read a very old number of Illustrated.

‘Word of seven letters beginning with C, meaning “heat to a high temperature”,’ said the corporal.

‘Calcine,’ I said.

‘That’s right – now I can get thirteen down – blank-p-blank: “man is descended from it.” Cor, I dunno how these blokes think of these things.’

‘Ape,’ I said.

‘I say, Corp,’ said the other bloke, whose name was Andy, ‘did you see that bit in this ’ere book about nudist camps?’

‘Ay, I saw that. I wouldn’t ’arf mind being a nudist, meself.’

‘Some o’ the tarts is proper smashing . . . It must be sort of queer at first – you’d think some of the blokes’d get a hell of a –’

‘Come on now,’ the corporal cut in, ‘let’s get on with some o’ them eleven-fifty-sevens.’

We started on the eleven-fifty-sevens: kit-lists of blokes who had just been demobbed.

‘This bastard’s diffy of one belt, web.’

‘That’s all right, there’s that buckshee one you whipped off the bloke that went to Catterick.’

‘Yes, but I thought I’d keep that – it might come in handy – you never know.’

‘Proper QM you’re getting – you better sign on.’

‘Catch me . . .’ The corporal suddenly turned to me. ‘Say, are you the bloke that signed on again?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘Cor, stone a crow. What you do it for – was the police after you?’

‘No – at least I don’t think they were.’

‘Come on Andy, get weaving.’

‘It’s half-twelve,’ said Andy, who had lit a fag and picked up the Mirror.

‘So it is and all – another morning gone,’ said the Corporal. ‘Sixty-six and a half days more before my demob – and by Christ,’ he added, with a grin at me, ‘they won’t get me back.’

At two o’clock we came back; Andy had scrounged a jug of tea from the cookhouse, and we sat around for half-an-hour drinking it. Then we checked some more of the kits: several of them were diffy.

‘You can’t blame them,’ said the corporal, philosophically, ‘not when they’re being demobbed.’

Andy went off at three o’clock to play football: the unit was playing the West Kents, and Andy was considered a very promising right-half.

‘You can get off anything in the Army, if you play football,’ said the corporal.

We checked the rest of the kits; then it was tea-time.

‘They’ve got welsh-rarebit on today,’ said the corporal. ‘Ought to be worth trying . . . You know,’ he added, looking at me with that expression of awe to which I was becoming, already, accustomed, ‘you know, I can’t make you out: an educated bloke like you signing on as a regular – it don’t seem natural.’

‘Probably,’ I said, ‘it’s not.’

After tea I had a wash and lay on my bed for half-an-hour; then I walked down Hospital Hill to Seabrook.

It had rained in the afternoon: the tarred road and the roofs of the barrack-buildings gleamed in the dusk with a hard, steely brightness. The sea lay, faintly distinguishable, beneath a thickening pall of cloud; in the west, the clouds had parted, showing a yellow rift of sunset-light. In front of me, as I walked down the hill, the Military Canal caught the last, rainy brightness: a broad ribbon of tarnished silver stretching away towards Hythe and the Marshes. Dimly, between the road and the sea, I could make out a scattered cluster of buildings: a vague shapeless mass which must be the old police-station, and a smaller, more angular silhouette which I recognized as that of the lifeboat-station – that extraordinary Gothic structure, more like a Chapel than a boathouse, which we used to call the Goose Cathedral.

III

It must (I thought) have been my friend Eric Anquetil who, in some far-off summer, had thus oddly christened it. The name had stuck; and I could never, afterwards, refer to the boathouse by any other name. We called it the ‘Goose Cathedral’ on account of the geese which, at that period, waddled about the shingle patch surrounding it. Standing there, bleakly isolated, where the coast-road curves inland through Seabrook, the ‘cathedral’ had appealed immediately to Eric’s taste for the odd and outlandish. Anything less like one’s idea of a lifeboat-station it would have been hard, indeed, to imagine. Seeing it from a passing bus, one would have supposed it to be some kind of Nonconformist tabernacle – a spiky and ornate affair in pseudo-Ruskinian Gothic. Yet who, after all, would build a chapel just here, on this desolate tract of coast, within a few yards of the sea itself?

Over the Gothic porch was inscribed the date of its completion – 1875. The walls were of a peculiarly forbidding grey stone, strongly built to withstand the south-west gales and the periodic assaults of the sea itself which, in winter, on days of high-tide, would flood the shingle patch and the road beyond. The slate roof was topped by a small turretted belfry; on either side of it protruded a pair of elaborately gabled windows. These struck a faintly anachronistic note, being small and circular and vaguely suggestive of portholes; one could fancy that the ‘chapel’ had been dedicated, originally, to some patron-saint of sailors.

In later years, I could appreciate the oddity of this chapel-by-the-sea; its incongruity was ‘amusing’ and at the same time rather sinister, like something in a surrealist picture. My friends laughed at it, and invented fantastic legends about its inhabitants; yet in my childhood there had seemed nothing specially odd about the boathouse; it was as much a normal part of the landscape as the neighbouring police-station, or the Fountain Hotel just across the road. To me it seemed no more surprising for a lifeboat to be housed in a chapel than for a snail to inhabit its shell; indeed, I should probably have been surprised (and perhaps a trifle shocked) if I had come across a lifeboat-station which was not built in the Gothic style.

Seeing it again now, looming dimly in the autumn dusk, I could hardly believe that it was indeed the true, the authentic Goose Cathedral which I was looking at. In the gathering dark it looked like the ghost of itself; and not less improbable, too, seemed the memories which, at the sudden sight of it, had flocked into my mind. Childhood memories – I remembered being taken to look at the lifeboat; memories of boyhood, botanizing on the shingle flats towards Hythe; and later occasions, when I had come back to live at Folkestone and had bathed, with Eric, from the beach below the boathouse. I remembered personalities and incidents that I hadn’t thought of for years; it was like re-reading a forgotten, rather ‘dated’ novel, which had seemed plausible and ‘true-to-life’ at the time but which, with the passing of the years, had lost its power to convince.

I felt oddly saddened by the spiky, Gothic silhouette, and the ghosts which (itself a ghost, it seemed) the ‘Goose Cathedral’ had evoked. I walked along to the Fountain Hotel, that friendly Victorian pub which stands at the corner where the lane called Horn Street branches off from the coast-road towards Dibgate and Pericar Woods.

The bar at the Fountain was almost empty.

‘Signed-on again, have you?’ said the landlord who, an ex-gunner himself, was inclined to be sympathetic. ‘You might do worse,’ he said.

Yes, I thought, as I ordered another pint: I might do worse.

I went back early: my two new pairs of boots needed further attention before tomorrow morning. I was in bed before lights out. I listened to the Last Post, sounding remote and melancholy from somewhere on the heights above. Then I slept. It seemed no more than an hour or two before I awoke, deadly-tired, and with a sense of outrage at being roused in the middle of the night. I woke to a blaze of light: footsteps clumped heavily past my bed; a moment later, a raucous blare of sound filled the room.

‘It’s now six ack-emma, British time . . . This is the American Forces Network, broadcasting to all American troops overseas . . .’