One of the chaps who’d worked with me at
Grimmett’s
had lost both
legs.
legs.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
Practically they were MY carp.
I
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived
at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and
they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was
what it felt like.
Then came the end of July, and even Lower Binlield grasped that things were happening.
For days there was tremendous vague excitement and endless leading articles in the
papers, which Father actually brought in from the shop to read aloud to Mother. And then
suddenly the posters everywhere:
GERMAN ULTIMATUM. FRANCE MOBILIZING
For several days (four days, wasn’t it? I forget the exact dates) there was a strange stifled
feeling, a kind of waiting hush, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, as though
the whole of England was silent and listening. It was very hot, I remember. In the shop it
was as though we couldn’t work, though already everyone in the neighbourhood who had
five bob to spare was rushing in to buy quantities of tinned stuff and flour and oatmeal. It
was as if we were too feverish to work, we only sweated and waited. In the evenings
people went down to the railway station and fought like devils over the evening papers
which arrived on the London train. And then one afternoon a boy came rushing down the
High Street with an armful of papers, and people were coming into their doorways to
shout across the street. Everyone was shouting ‘We’ve come in! We’ve come in! ’ The
boy grabbed a poster from his bundle and stuck it on the shop-front opposite:
ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
We rushed out on to the pavement, all three assistants, and cheered. Everybody was
cheering. Yes, cheering. But old Grimmett, though he’d already done pretty well out of
the war- scare, still held on to a little of his Liberal principles, ‘didn’t hold’ with the war,
and said it would be a bad business.
Two months later I was in the Anny. Seven months later I was in France.
8
I wasn’t wounded till late in 1916.
We’d just come out of the trenches and were marching over a bit of road a mile or so
back which was supposed to be safe, but which the Germans must have got the range of
some time earlier. Suddenly they started putting a few shells over — it was heavy H. E.
stuff, and they were only firing about one a minute. There was the usual zwee-e-e-e! and
then BOOM! in a field somewhere over to the right. I think it was the third shell that got
me. I knew as soon as I heard it coming that it had my name written on it. They say you
always know. It didn’t say what an ordinary shell says. It said ‘I’m after you, you b — ,
YOU, you b — , YOU! ’ — all this in the space of about three seconds. And the last you
was the explosion.
I felt as if an enormous hand made of air were sweeping me along. And presently I came
down with a sort of burst, shattered feeling among a lot of old tin cans, splinters of wood,
rusty barbed wire, turds, empty cartridge cases, and other muck in the ditch at the side of
the road. When they’d hauled me out and cleaned some of the dirt off me they found that
I wasn’t very badly hurt. It was only a lot of small shell-splinters that had lodged in one
side of my bottom and down the backs of my legs. But luckily I’d broken a rib in falling,
which made it just bad enough to get me back to England. I spent that winter in a hospital
camp on the downs near Eastbourne.
Do you remember those war-time hospital camps? The long rows of wooden huts like
chicken-houses stuck right on top of those beastly icy downs — the ‘south coast’, people
used to call it, which made me wonder what the north coast could be like — where the
wind seems to blow at you from all directions at once. And the droves of blokes in their
pale-blue flannel suits and red ties, wandering up and down looking for a place out of the
wind and never finding one. Sometimes the kids from the slap-up boys’ schools in
Eastbourne used to be led round in crocodiles to hand out fags and peppermint creams to
the ‘wounded Tommies’, as they called us. A pink-faced kid of about eight would walk
up to a knot of wounded men sitting on the grass, split open a packet of Woodbines and
solemnly hand one fag to each man, just like feeding the monkeys at the zoo. Anyone
who was strong enough used to wander for miles over the downs in hopes of meeting
girls. There were never enough girls to go round. In the valley below the camp there was
a bit of a spinney, and long before dusk you’d see a couple glued against every tree, and
sometimes, if it happened to be a thick tree, one on each side of it. My chief memory of
that time is sitting against a gorse-bush in the freezing wind, with my fingers so cold I
couldn’t bend them and the taste of a peppermint cream in my mouth. That’s a typical
soldier’s memory. But I was getting away from a Tommy’s life, all the same. The C. O.
had sent my name in for a commission a little before I was wounded. By this time they
were desperate for officers and anyone who wasn’t actually illiterate could have a
commission if he wanted one. I went straight from the hospital to an officers’ training
camp near Colchester.
It’s very strange, the things the war did to people. It was less than three years since I’d
been a spry young shop-assistant, bending over the counter in my white apron with ‘Yes,
madam! Certainly, madam! AND the next order, madam? ’ with a grocer’s life ahead of
me and about as much notion of becoming an Army officer as of getting a knighthood.
And here I was already, swaggering about in a gorblimey hat and a yellow collar and
more or less keeping my end up among a crowd of other temporary gents and some who
weren’t even temporary. And — this is really the point — not feeling it in any way strange.
Nothing seemed strange in those days.
It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of
your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t
have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The annies would just
pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined
up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my
England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of
the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men
in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant
little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always ‘on tables’, as
though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to
them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked
with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never
dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have
seemed particularly strange. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished. It was as
though it didn’t concern me any longer. I wonder if you’d believe that from that day
forward I only once went back to Lower Bin Held, and that was to Mother’s funeral? It
sounds incredible now, but it seemed natural enough at the time. Partly, I admit, it was on
account of Elsie, whom, of course, I’d stopped writing to after two or three months. No
doubt she’d picked up with someone else, but I didn’t want to meet her. Otherwise,
perhaps, when I got a bit of leave I’d have gone down and seen Mother, who’d had fits
when I joined the Army but would have been proud of a son in uniform.
Father died in 1915. I was in France at the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say that
Father’s death hurts me more now than it did then. At the time it was just a bit of bad
news which I accepted almost without interest, in the sort of empty-headed apathetic way
in which one accepted everything in the trenches. I remember crawling into the doorway
of the dugout to get enough light to read the letter, and I remember Mother’s tear-stains
on the letter, and the aching feeling in my knees and the smell of mud. Father’s life-
insurance policy had been mortgaged for most of its value, but there was a little money in
the bank and Sarazins’ were going to buy up the stock and even pay some tiny amount
for the good-will. Anyway, Mother had a bit over two hundred pounds, besides the
furniture. She went for the time being to lodge with her cousin, the wife of a small-holder
who was doing pretty well out of the war, near Doxley, a few miles the other side of
Walton. It was only ‘for the time being’. There was a temporary feeling about everything.
In the old days, which as a matter of fact were barely a year old, the whole thing would
have been an appalling disaster. With Father dead, the shop sold and Mother with two
hundred pounds in the world, you’d have seen stretching out in front of you a kind of
fifteen-act tragedy, the last act being a pauper’s funeral. But now the war and the feeling
of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything. People hardly thought in terms
of things like bankruptcy and the workhouse any longer. This was the case even with
Mother, who, God knows, had only very dim notions about the war. Besides, she was
already dying, though neither of us knew it.
She came across to see me in the hospital at Eastbourne. It was over two years since I’d
seen her, and her appearance gave me a bit of a shock. She seemed to have faded and
somehow to have shrunken. Partly it was because by this time I was grown-up, I’d
travelled, and everything looked smaller to me, but there was no question that she’d got
thinner, and also yellower. She talked in the old rambling way about Aunt Martha (that
was the cousin she was staying with), and the changes in Fower Binfield since the war,
and all the boys who’d ‘gone’ (meaning joined the Anny), and her indigestion which was
‘aggravating’, and poor Father’s tombstone and what a lovely corpse he made. It was the
old talk, the talk I’d listened to for years, and yet somehow it was like a ghost talking. It
didn’t concern me any longer. I’d kn own her as a great splendid protecting kind of
creature, a bit like a ship’s figure-head and a bit like a broody hen, and after all she was
only a little old woman in a black dress. Everything was changing and fading. That was
the last time I saw her alive. I got the wire saying she was seriously ill when I was at the
training school at Colchester, and put in for a week’s urgent leave immediately. But it
was too late. She was dead by the time I got to Doxley. What she and everyone else had
imagined to be indigestion was some kind of internal growth, and a sudden chill on the
stomach put the final touch. The doctor tried to cheer me up by telling me that the growth
was ‘benevolent’, which struck me as a queer thing to call it, seeing that it had killed her.
Well, we buried her next to Father, and that was my last glimpse of Lower Binfield. It
had changed a lot, even in three years. Some of the shops were shut, some had different
names over them. Nearly all the men I’d known as boys were gone, and some of them
were dead. Sid Lovegrove was dead, killed on the Somme. Ginger Watson, the fann lad
who’d belonged to the Black Hand years ago, the one who used to catch rabbits alive,
was dead in Egypt.
One of the chaps who’d worked with me at Grimmett’s had lost both
legs. Old Lovegrove had shut up his shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a
tiny annuity. Old Grimmett, on the other hand, was doing well out of the war and had
turned patriotic and was a member of the local board which tried conscientious objectors.
The thing which more than anything else gave the town an empty, forlorn kind of look
was that there were practically no horses left. Every horse worth taking had been
commandeered long ago. The station fly still existed, but the brute that pulled it wouldn’t
have been able to stand up if it hadn’t been for the shafts. For the hour or so that I was
there before the funeral I wandered round the town, saying how d’you do to people and
showing off my uniform. Luckily I didn’t run into Elsie. I saw all the changes, and yet it
was as though I didn’t see them. My mind was on other things, chiefly the pleasure of
being seen in my second-loot’s unifonn, with my black armlet (a thing which looks rather
smart on khaki) and my new whipcord breeches. I distinctly remember that I was still
thinking about those whipcord breeches when we stood at the graveside. And then they
chucked some earth on to the coffin and I suddenly realized what it means for your
mother to be lying with seven feet of earth on top of her, and something kind of twitched
behind my eyes and nose, but even then the whipcord breeches weren’t altogether out of
my mind.
Don’t think I didn’t feel for Mother’s death. I did. I wasn’t in the trenches any longer, I
could feel sorry for a death. But the thing I didn’t care a damn about, didn’t even grasp to
be happening, was the passing-away of the old life I’d known. After the funeral, Aunt
Martha, who was rather proud of having a ‘real officer’ for a nephew and would have
made a splash of the funeral if I’d let her, went back to Doxley on the bus and I took the
fly down to the station, to get the train to London and then to Colchester. We drove past
the shop. No one had taken it since Father died. It was shut up and the window-pane was
black with dust, and they’d burned the ‘S. Bowling’ off the signboard with a plumber’s
blowflame. Well, there was the house where I’d been a child and a boy and a young man,
where I’d crawled about the kitchen floor and smelt the sainfoin and read ‘Donovan the
Dauntless’, where I’d done my homework for the Grammar School, mixed bread paste,
mended bicycle punctures, and tried on my first high collar. It had been as permanent to
me as the Pyramids, and now it would be just an accident if I ever set foot in it again.
Father, Mother, Joe, the errand boys, old Nailer the terrier, Spot, the one that came after
Nailer, Jackie the bullfinch, the cats, the mice in the loft — all gone, nothing left but dust.
And I didn’t care a damn. I was sorry Mother was dead, I was even sorry Father was
dead, but all the time my mind was on other things. I was a bit proud of being seen riding
in a cab, a thing I hadn’t yet got used to, and I was thinking of the sit of my new
whipcord breeches, and my nice smooth officer’s putties, so different from the gritty stuff
the Tommies had to wear, and of the other chaps at Colchester and the sixty quid Mother
had left and the beanos we’d have with it. Also I was thanking God that I hadn’t
happened to run into Elsie.
The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the
way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them. It was like a great flood
rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where
you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them.
There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere,
there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had
been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and
typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia.
People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years
on end. This was what happened to myself, or very likely I wouldn’t be here. The whole
sequence of events is rather interesting.
A little while after I was gazetted there was a call for officers of the A. S. C. As soon as
the O. C. of the training camp heard that I knew something about the grocery trade (I
didn’t let on that I’d actually been behind the counter) he told me to send my name in.
That went through all right, and I was just about to leave for another training-school for
A. S. C. officers somewhere in the Midlands when there was a demand for a young officer,
with knowledge of the grocery trade, to act as some kind of secretary to Sir Joseph
Cheam, who was a big noise in the A. S. C. God knows why they picked me out, but at
any rate they did so. I’ve since thought that they probably mixed my name up with
somebody else’s. Three days later I was saluting in Sir Joseph’s office. He was a lean,
upright, rather handsome old boy with grizzled hair and a grave-looking nose which
immediately impressed me. He looked the perfect professional soldier, the K. C. M. G. ,
D. S. O. with bar type, and might have been twin brother to the chap in the De Reszke
advert, though in private life he was chairman of one of the big chain groceries and
famous all over the world for something called the Cheam Wage-Cut System. He stopped
writing as I came in and looked me over.
‘You a gentleman? ’
‘No, sir. ’
‘Good. Then perhaps we’ll get some work done. ’
In about three minutes he’d wormed out of me that I had no secretarial experience, didn’t
know shorthand, couldn’t use a typewriter, and had worked in a grocery at twenty-eight
shillings a week. However, he said that I’d do, there were too many gentlemen in this
damned Army and he’d been looking for somebody who could count beyond ten. I liked
him and looked forward to working for him, but just at this moment the mysterious
powers that seemed to be running the war drove us apart again. Something called the
West Coast Defence Force was being formed, or rather was being talked about, and there
was some vague idea of establishing dumps of rations and other stores at various points
along the coast. Sir Joseph was supposed to be responsible for the dumps in the south-
west comer of England. The day after I joined his office he sent me down to check over
the stores at a place called Twelve Mile Dump, on the North Cornish Coast. Or rather my
job was to find out whether any stores existed. Nobody seemed certain about this. I’d just
got there and discovered that the stores consisted of eleven tins of bully beef when a wire
arrived from the War Office telling me to take charge of the stores at Twelve Mile Dump
and remain there till further notice. I wired back ‘No stores at Twelve Mile Dump. ’ Too
late. Next day came the official letter informing me that I was O. C. Twelve Mile Dump.
And that’s really the end of the story. I remained O. C. Twelve Mile Dump for the rest of
the war.
God knows what it was all about. It’s no use asking me what the West Coast Defence
Force was or what it was supposed to do. Even at that time nobody pretended to know. In
any case it didn’t exist. It was just a scheme that had floated through somebody’s mind —
following on some vague rumour of a German invasion via Ireland, I suppose — and the
food dumps which were supposed to exist all along the coast were also imaginary. The
whole thing had existed for about three days, like a sort of bubble, and then had been
forgotten, and I’d been forgotten with it. My eleven tins of bully beef had been left
behind by some officers who had been there earlier on some other mysterious mission.
They’d also left behind a very deaf old man called Private Lidgebird. What Lidgebird
was supposed to be doing there I never discovered. I wonder whether you’ll believe that I
remained guarding those eleven tins of bully beef from half-way through 1917 to the
beginning of 1919? Probably you won’t, but it’s the truth. And at the time even that
didn’t seem particularly strange. By 1918 one had simply got out of the habit of
expecting things to happen in a reasonable manner.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the
number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets,
waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and
apple jam under my care. I just entered ‘nil’ against everything and sent the form back.
Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending
out more forms, and filing those, and so on. It was the way things were happening. The
mysterious higher-ups who were running the war had forgotten my existence. I didn’t jog
their memory. I was up a backwater that didn’t lead anywhere, and after two years in
France I wasn’t so burning with patriotism that I wanted to get out of it.
It was a lonely part of the coast where you never saw a soul except a few yokels who’d
barely heard there was a war on. A quarter of a mile away, down a little hill, the sea
boomed and surged over enormous flats of sand. Nine months of the year it rained, and
the other three a raging wind blew off the Atlantic. There was nothing there except
Private Lidgebird, myself, two Army huts — one of them a decentish two-roomed hut
which I inhabited — and the eleven tins of bully beef. Lidgebird was a surly old devil and
I could never get much out of him except the fact that he’d been a market gardener before
he joined the Army. It was interesting to see how rapidly he was reverting to type. Even
before I got to Twelve Mile Dump he’d dug a patch round one of the huts and started
planting spuds, in the autumn he dug another patch till he’d got about half an acre under
cultivation, at the beginning of 1918 he started keeping hens which had got to quite a
number by the end of the summer, and towards the end of the year he suddenly produced
a pig from God knows where. I don’t think it crossed his mind to wonder what the devil
we were doing there, or what the West Coast Defence Force was and whether it actually
existed. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he’s there still, raising pigs and potatoes on
the spot where Twelve Mile Dump used to be. I hope he is. Good luck to him.
Meanwhile I was doing something I’d never before had the chance to do as a full-time
job — reading.
The officers who’d been there before had left a few books behind, mostly sevenpenny
editions and nearly all of them the kind of tripe that people were reading in those days.
Ian Hay and Sapper and the Craig Kennedy stories and so forth. But at some time or other
somebody had been there who knew what books are worth reading and what are not. I
myself, at the time, didn’t know anything of the kind. The only books I’d ever voluntarily
read were detective stories and once in a way a smutty sex book. God knows I don’t set
up to be a highbrow even now, but if you’d asked me THEN for the name of a ‘good’
book I’d have answered The Woman Thou Gavest Me, or (in memory of the vicar)
Sesame and Lilies. In any case a ‘good’ book was a book one didn’t have any intention of
reading. But there I was, in a job where there was less than nothing to do, with the sea
booming on the beach and the rain streaming down the window-panes — and a whole row
of books staring me in the face on the temporary shelf someone had rigged up against the
wall of the hut. Naturally I started to read them from end to end, with, at the beginning,
about as much attempt to discriminate as a pig working its way through a pail of garbage.
But in among them there were three or four books that were different from the others. No,
you’ve got it wrong! Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel
Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These
books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens
that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment,
so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you. One of them was H. G.
Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I
wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been
brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book
like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. It had been the scandal of
the season a few years back, and I’d even heard vague rumours of it in Lower Binfield.
Another was Conrad’s Victory, parts of which bored me. But books like that started you
thinking. And there was a back number of some magazine with a blue cover which had a
short story of D. H. Lawrence’s in it. I don’t remember the name of it. It was a story
about a German conscript who shoves his sergeant-major over the edge of a fortification
and then does a bunk and gets caught in his girl’s bedroom. It puzzled me a lot. I couldn’t
make out what it was all about, and yet it left me with a vague feeling that I’d like to read
some others like it.
Well, for several months I had an appetite for books that was almost like physical thirst.
It was the first real go-in at reading that I’d had since my Dick Donovan days. At the
beginning I had no idea how to set about getting hold of books. I thought the only way
was to buy them. That’s interesting, I think. It shows you the difference upbringing
makes. I suppose the children of the middle classes, the 500 pounds a year middle
classes, know all about Mudie’s and the Times Book Club when they’re in their cradles.
A bit later I learned of the existence of lending libraries and took out a subscription at
Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol. And what I read during the next year or so!
Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver
Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna,
May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock,
and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are
kn own to you, I wonder? Half the books that people took seriously in those days are
forgotten now. But at the beginning I swallowed them all down like a whale that’s got in
among a shoal of shrimps. I just revelled in them. After a bit, of course, I grew more
highbrow and began to distinguish between tripe and not-tripe. I got hold of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers and sort of half-enjoyed it, and I got a lot of kick out of Oscar Wilde’s
Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Wells was the author who made the
biggest impression on me. I read George Moore’s Esther Waters and liked it, and I tried
several of Hardy’s novels and always got stuck about half-way through. I even had a go
at Ibsen, who left me with a vague impression that in Norway it’s always raining.
It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with
hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and
Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the
counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer.
If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm.
At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-
learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a
kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life
in a nonnal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really
changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the
rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.
It really was unspeakably meaningless, that time in 1918. Here I was, sitting beside the
stove in an Army hut, reading novels, and a few hundred miles away in France the guns
were roaring and droves of wretched children, wetting their bags with fright, were being
driven into the machine-gun barrage like you’d shoot small coke into a furnace. I was one
of the lucky ones. The higher-ups had taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug
little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn’t exist. At times I got into a panic and
made sure they’d remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official
forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them
back, and more forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went
on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic’s dream. The effect of all
this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in
everything.
I wasn’t the only one. The war was full of loose ends and forgotten comers. By this time
literally millions of people were stuck up backwaters of one kind and another. Whole
armies were rotting away on fronts that people had forgotten the names of. There were
huge Ministries with hordes of clerks and typists all drawing two pounds a week and
upwards for piling up mounds of paper. Moreover they knew perfectly well that all they
were doing was to pile up mounds of paper. Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the
gallant little Belgium stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good
fellows and hated the French like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff
as mental defectives. A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England, and it even
got as far as Twelve Mile Dump. It would be an exaggeration to say that the war turned
people into highbrows, but it did turn them into nihilists for the time being. People who in
a nonnal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for
themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war. What should I be
now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am.
If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that
unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and
unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived
at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and
they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was
what it felt like.
Then came the end of July, and even Lower Binlield grasped that things were happening.
For days there was tremendous vague excitement and endless leading articles in the
papers, which Father actually brought in from the shop to read aloud to Mother. And then
suddenly the posters everywhere:
GERMAN ULTIMATUM. FRANCE MOBILIZING
For several days (four days, wasn’t it? I forget the exact dates) there was a strange stifled
feeling, a kind of waiting hush, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, as though
the whole of England was silent and listening. It was very hot, I remember. In the shop it
was as though we couldn’t work, though already everyone in the neighbourhood who had
five bob to spare was rushing in to buy quantities of tinned stuff and flour and oatmeal. It
was as if we were too feverish to work, we only sweated and waited. In the evenings
people went down to the railway station and fought like devils over the evening papers
which arrived on the London train. And then one afternoon a boy came rushing down the
High Street with an armful of papers, and people were coming into their doorways to
shout across the street. Everyone was shouting ‘We’ve come in! We’ve come in! ’ The
boy grabbed a poster from his bundle and stuck it on the shop-front opposite:
ENGLAND DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
We rushed out on to the pavement, all three assistants, and cheered. Everybody was
cheering. Yes, cheering. But old Grimmett, though he’d already done pretty well out of
the war- scare, still held on to a little of his Liberal principles, ‘didn’t hold’ with the war,
and said it would be a bad business.
Two months later I was in the Anny. Seven months later I was in France.
8
I wasn’t wounded till late in 1916.
We’d just come out of the trenches and were marching over a bit of road a mile or so
back which was supposed to be safe, but which the Germans must have got the range of
some time earlier. Suddenly they started putting a few shells over — it was heavy H. E.
stuff, and they were only firing about one a minute. There was the usual zwee-e-e-e! and
then BOOM! in a field somewhere over to the right. I think it was the third shell that got
me. I knew as soon as I heard it coming that it had my name written on it. They say you
always know. It didn’t say what an ordinary shell says. It said ‘I’m after you, you b — ,
YOU, you b — , YOU! ’ — all this in the space of about three seconds. And the last you
was the explosion.
I felt as if an enormous hand made of air were sweeping me along. And presently I came
down with a sort of burst, shattered feeling among a lot of old tin cans, splinters of wood,
rusty barbed wire, turds, empty cartridge cases, and other muck in the ditch at the side of
the road. When they’d hauled me out and cleaned some of the dirt off me they found that
I wasn’t very badly hurt. It was only a lot of small shell-splinters that had lodged in one
side of my bottom and down the backs of my legs. But luckily I’d broken a rib in falling,
which made it just bad enough to get me back to England. I spent that winter in a hospital
camp on the downs near Eastbourne.
Do you remember those war-time hospital camps? The long rows of wooden huts like
chicken-houses stuck right on top of those beastly icy downs — the ‘south coast’, people
used to call it, which made me wonder what the north coast could be like — where the
wind seems to blow at you from all directions at once. And the droves of blokes in their
pale-blue flannel suits and red ties, wandering up and down looking for a place out of the
wind and never finding one. Sometimes the kids from the slap-up boys’ schools in
Eastbourne used to be led round in crocodiles to hand out fags and peppermint creams to
the ‘wounded Tommies’, as they called us. A pink-faced kid of about eight would walk
up to a knot of wounded men sitting on the grass, split open a packet of Woodbines and
solemnly hand one fag to each man, just like feeding the monkeys at the zoo. Anyone
who was strong enough used to wander for miles over the downs in hopes of meeting
girls. There were never enough girls to go round. In the valley below the camp there was
a bit of a spinney, and long before dusk you’d see a couple glued against every tree, and
sometimes, if it happened to be a thick tree, one on each side of it. My chief memory of
that time is sitting against a gorse-bush in the freezing wind, with my fingers so cold I
couldn’t bend them and the taste of a peppermint cream in my mouth. That’s a typical
soldier’s memory. But I was getting away from a Tommy’s life, all the same. The C. O.
had sent my name in for a commission a little before I was wounded. By this time they
were desperate for officers and anyone who wasn’t actually illiterate could have a
commission if he wanted one. I went straight from the hospital to an officers’ training
camp near Colchester.
It’s very strange, the things the war did to people. It was less than three years since I’d
been a spry young shop-assistant, bending over the counter in my white apron with ‘Yes,
madam! Certainly, madam! AND the next order, madam? ’ with a grocer’s life ahead of
me and about as much notion of becoming an Army officer as of getting a knighthood.
And here I was already, swaggering about in a gorblimey hat and a yellow collar and
more or less keeping my end up among a crowd of other temporary gents and some who
weren’t even temporary. And — this is really the point — not feeling it in any way strange.
Nothing seemed strange in those days.
It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of
your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t
have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The annies would just
pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined
up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my
England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of
the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men
in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant
little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always ‘on tables’, as
though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to
them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked
with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never
dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have
seemed particularly strange. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished. It was as
though it didn’t concern me any longer. I wonder if you’d believe that from that day
forward I only once went back to Lower Bin Held, and that was to Mother’s funeral? It
sounds incredible now, but it seemed natural enough at the time. Partly, I admit, it was on
account of Elsie, whom, of course, I’d stopped writing to after two or three months. No
doubt she’d picked up with someone else, but I didn’t want to meet her. Otherwise,
perhaps, when I got a bit of leave I’d have gone down and seen Mother, who’d had fits
when I joined the Army but would have been proud of a son in uniform.
Father died in 1915. I was in France at the time. I don’t exaggerate when I say that
Father’s death hurts me more now than it did then. At the time it was just a bit of bad
news which I accepted almost without interest, in the sort of empty-headed apathetic way
in which one accepted everything in the trenches. I remember crawling into the doorway
of the dugout to get enough light to read the letter, and I remember Mother’s tear-stains
on the letter, and the aching feeling in my knees and the smell of mud. Father’s life-
insurance policy had been mortgaged for most of its value, but there was a little money in
the bank and Sarazins’ were going to buy up the stock and even pay some tiny amount
for the good-will. Anyway, Mother had a bit over two hundred pounds, besides the
furniture. She went for the time being to lodge with her cousin, the wife of a small-holder
who was doing pretty well out of the war, near Doxley, a few miles the other side of
Walton. It was only ‘for the time being’. There was a temporary feeling about everything.
In the old days, which as a matter of fact were barely a year old, the whole thing would
have been an appalling disaster. With Father dead, the shop sold and Mother with two
hundred pounds in the world, you’d have seen stretching out in front of you a kind of
fifteen-act tragedy, the last act being a pauper’s funeral. But now the war and the feeling
of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything. People hardly thought in terms
of things like bankruptcy and the workhouse any longer. This was the case even with
Mother, who, God knows, had only very dim notions about the war. Besides, she was
already dying, though neither of us knew it.
She came across to see me in the hospital at Eastbourne. It was over two years since I’d
seen her, and her appearance gave me a bit of a shock. She seemed to have faded and
somehow to have shrunken. Partly it was because by this time I was grown-up, I’d
travelled, and everything looked smaller to me, but there was no question that she’d got
thinner, and also yellower. She talked in the old rambling way about Aunt Martha (that
was the cousin she was staying with), and the changes in Fower Binfield since the war,
and all the boys who’d ‘gone’ (meaning joined the Anny), and her indigestion which was
‘aggravating’, and poor Father’s tombstone and what a lovely corpse he made. It was the
old talk, the talk I’d listened to for years, and yet somehow it was like a ghost talking. It
didn’t concern me any longer. I’d kn own her as a great splendid protecting kind of
creature, a bit like a ship’s figure-head and a bit like a broody hen, and after all she was
only a little old woman in a black dress. Everything was changing and fading. That was
the last time I saw her alive. I got the wire saying she was seriously ill when I was at the
training school at Colchester, and put in for a week’s urgent leave immediately. But it
was too late. She was dead by the time I got to Doxley. What she and everyone else had
imagined to be indigestion was some kind of internal growth, and a sudden chill on the
stomach put the final touch. The doctor tried to cheer me up by telling me that the growth
was ‘benevolent’, which struck me as a queer thing to call it, seeing that it had killed her.
Well, we buried her next to Father, and that was my last glimpse of Lower Binfield. It
had changed a lot, even in three years. Some of the shops were shut, some had different
names over them. Nearly all the men I’d known as boys were gone, and some of them
were dead. Sid Lovegrove was dead, killed on the Somme. Ginger Watson, the fann lad
who’d belonged to the Black Hand years ago, the one who used to catch rabbits alive,
was dead in Egypt.
One of the chaps who’d worked with me at Grimmett’s had lost both
legs. Old Lovegrove had shut up his shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a
tiny annuity. Old Grimmett, on the other hand, was doing well out of the war and had
turned patriotic and was a member of the local board which tried conscientious objectors.
The thing which more than anything else gave the town an empty, forlorn kind of look
was that there were practically no horses left. Every horse worth taking had been
commandeered long ago. The station fly still existed, but the brute that pulled it wouldn’t
have been able to stand up if it hadn’t been for the shafts. For the hour or so that I was
there before the funeral I wandered round the town, saying how d’you do to people and
showing off my uniform. Luckily I didn’t run into Elsie. I saw all the changes, and yet it
was as though I didn’t see them. My mind was on other things, chiefly the pleasure of
being seen in my second-loot’s unifonn, with my black armlet (a thing which looks rather
smart on khaki) and my new whipcord breeches. I distinctly remember that I was still
thinking about those whipcord breeches when we stood at the graveside. And then they
chucked some earth on to the coffin and I suddenly realized what it means for your
mother to be lying with seven feet of earth on top of her, and something kind of twitched
behind my eyes and nose, but even then the whipcord breeches weren’t altogether out of
my mind.
Don’t think I didn’t feel for Mother’s death. I did. I wasn’t in the trenches any longer, I
could feel sorry for a death. But the thing I didn’t care a damn about, didn’t even grasp to
be happening, was the passing-away of the old life I’d known. After the funeral, Aunt
Martha, who was rather proud of having a ‘real officer’ for a nephew and would have
made a splash of the funeral if I’d let her, went back to Doxley on the bus and I took the
fly down to the station, to get the train to London and then to Colchester. We drove past
the shop. No one had taken it since Father died. It was shut up and the window-pane was
black with dust, and they’d burned the ‘S. Bowling’ off the signboard with a plumber’s
blowflame. Well, there was the house where I’d been a child and a boy and a young man,
where I’d crawled about the kitchen floor and smelt the sainfoin and read ‘Donovan the
Dauntless’, where I’d done my homework for the Grammar School, mixed bread paste,
mended bicycle punctures, and tried on my first high collar. It had been as permanent to
me as the Pyramids, and now it would be just an accident if I ever set foot in it again.
Father, Mother, Joe, the errand boys, old Nailer the terrier, Spot, the one that came after
Nailer, Jackie the bullfinch, the cats, the mice in the loft — all gone, nothing left but dust.
And I didn’t care a damn. I was sorry Mother was dead, I was even sorry Father was
dead, but all the time my mind was on other things. I was a bit proud of being seen riding
in a cab, a thing I hadn’t yet got used to, and I was thinking of the sit of my new
whipcord breeches, and my nice smooth officer’s putties, so different from the gritty stuff
the Tommies had to wear, and of the other chaps at Colchester and the sixty quid Mother
had left and the beanos we’d have with it. Also I was thanking God that I hadn’t
happened to run into Elsie.
The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the
way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them. It was like a great flood
rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where
you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them.
There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere,
there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had
been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and
typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia.
People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years
on end. This was what happened to myself, or very likely I wouldn’t be here. The whole
sequence of events is rather interesting.
A little while after I was gazetted there was a call for officers of the A. S. C. As soon as
the O. C. of the training camp heard that I knew something about the grocery trade (I
didn’t let on that I’d actually been behind the counter) he told me to send my name in.
That went through all right, and I was just about to leave for another training-school for
A. S. C. officers somewhere in the Midlands when there was a demand for a young officer,
with knowledge of the grocery trade, to act as some kind of secretary to Sir Joseph
Cheam, who was a big noise in the A. S. C. God knows why they picked me out, but at
any rate they did so. I’ve since thought that they probably mixed my name up with
somebody else’s. Three days later I was saluting in Sir Joseph’s office. He was a lean,
upright, rather handsome old boy with grizzled hair and a grave-looking nose which
immediately impressed me. He looked the perfect professional soldier, the K. C. M. G. ,
D. S. O. with bar type, and might have been twin brother to the chap in the De Reszke
advert, though in private life he was chairman of one of the big chain groceries and
famous all over the world for something called the Cheam Wage-Cut System. He stopped
writing as I came in and looked me over.
‘You a gentleman? ’
‘No, sir. ’
‘Good. Then perhaps we’ll get some work done. ’
In about three minutes he’d wormed out of me that I had no secretarial experience, didn’t
know shorthand, couldn’t use a typewriter, and had worked in a grocery at twenty-eight
shillings a week. However, he said that I’d do, there were too many gentlemen in this
damned Army and he’d been looking for somebody who could count beyond ten. I liked
him and looked forward to working for him, but just at this moment the mysterious
powers that seemed to be running the war drove us apart again. Something called the
West Coast Defence Force was being formed, or rather was being talked about, and there
was some vague idea of establishing dumps of rations and other stores at various points
along the coast. Sir Joseph was supposed to be responsible for the dumps in the south-
west comer of England. The day after I joined his office he sent me down to check over
the stores at a place called Twelve Mile Dump, on the North Cornish Coast. Or rather my
job was to find out whether any stores existed. Nobody seemed certain about this. I’d just
got there and discovered that the stores consisted of eleven tins of bully beef when a wire
arrived from the War Office telling me to take charge of the stores at Twelve Mile Dump
and remain there till further notice. I wired back ‘No stores at Twelve Mile Dump. ’ Too
late. Next day came the official letter informing me that I was O. C. Twelve Mile Dump.
And that’s really the end of the story. I remained O. C. Twelve Mile Dump for the rest of
the war.
God knows what it was all about. It’s no use asking me what the West Coast Defence
Force was or what it was supposed to do. Even at that time nobody pretended to know. In
any case it didn’t exist. It was just a scheme that had floated through somebody’s mind —
following on some vague rumour of a German invasion via Ireland, I suppose — and the
food dumps which were supposed to exist all along the coast were also imaginary. The
whole thing had existed for about three days, like a sort of bubble, and then had been
forgotten, and I’d been forgotten with it. My eleven tins of bully beef had been left
behind by some officers who had been there earlier on some other mysterious mission.
They’d also left behind a very deaf old man called Private Lidgebird. What Lidgebird
was supposed to be doing there I never discovered. I wonder whether you’ll believe that I
remained guarding those eleven tins of bully beef from half-way through 1917 to the
beginning of 1919? Probably you won’t, but it’s the truth. And at the time even that
didn’t seem particularly strange. By 1918 one had simply got out of the habit of
expecting things to happen in a reasonable manner.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the
number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets,
waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and
apple jam under my care. I just entered ‘nil’ against everything and sent the form back.
Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending
out more forms, and filing those, and so on. It was the way things were happening. The
mysterious higher-ups who were running the war had forgotten my existence. I didn’t jog
their memory. I was up a backwater that didn’t lead anywhere, and after two years in
France I wasn’t so burning with patriotism that I wanted to get out of it.
It was a lonely part of the coast where you never saw a soul except a few yokels who’d
barely heard there was a war on. A quarter of a mile away, down a little hill, the sea
boomed and surged over enormous flats of sand. Nine months of the year it rained, and
the other three a raging wind blew off the Atlantic. There was nothing there except
Private Lidgebird, myself, two Army huts — one of them a decentish two-roomed hut
which I inhabited — and the eleven tins of bully beef. Lidgebird was a surly old devil and
I could never get much out of him except the fact that he’d been a market gardener before
he joined the Army. It was interesting to see how rapidly he was reverting to type. Even
before I got to Twelve Mile Dump he’d dug a patch round one of the huts and started
planting spuds, in the autumn he dug another patch till he’d got about half an acre under
cultivation, at the beginning of 1918 he started keeping hens which had got to quite a
number by the end of the summer, and towards the end of the year he suddenly produced
a pig from God knows where. I don’t think it crossed his mind to wonder what the devil
we were doing there, or what the West Coast Defence Force was and whether it actually
existed. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he’s there still, raising pigs and potatoes on
the spot where Twelve Mile Dump used to be. I hope he is. Good luck to him.
Meanwhile I was doing something I’d never before had the chance to do as a full-time
job — reading.
The officers who’d been there before had left a few books behind, mostly sevenpenny
editions and nearly all of them the kind of tripe that people were reading in those days.
Ian Hay and Sapper and the Craig Kennedy stories and so forth. But at some time or other
somebody had been there who knew what books are worth reading and what are not. I
myself, at the time, didn’t know anything of the kind. The only books I’d ever voluntarily
read were detective stories and once in a way a smutty sex book. God knows I don’t set
up to be a highbrow even now, but if you’d asked me THEN for the name of a ‘good’
book I’d have answered The Woman Thou Gavest Me, or (in memory of the vicar)
Sesame and Lilies. In any case a ‘good’ book was a book one didn’t have any intention of
reading. But there I was, in a job where there was less than nothing to do, with the sea
booming on the beach and the rain streaming down the window-panes — and a whole row
of books staring me in the face on the temporary shelf someone had rigged up against the
wall of the hut. Naturally I started to read them from end to end, with, at the beginning,
about as much attempt to discriminate as a pig working its way through a pail of garbage.
But in among them there were three or four books that were different from the others. No,
you’ve got it wrong! Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel
Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These
books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens
that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment,
so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you. One of them was H. G.
Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I
wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been
brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book
like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street. It had been the scandal of
the season a few years back, and I’d even heard vague rumours of it in Lower Binfield.
Another was Conrad’s Victory, parts of which bored me. But books like that started you
thinking. And there was a back number of some magazine with a blue cover which had a
short story of D. H. Lawrence’s in it. I don’t remember the name of it. It was a story
about a German conscript who shoves his sergeant-major over the edge of a fortification
and then does a bunk and gets caught in his girl’s bedroom. It puzzled me a lot. I couldn’t
make out what it was all about, and yet it left me with a vague feeling that I’d like to read
some others like it.
Well, for several months I had an appetite for books that was almost like physical thirst.
It was the first real go-in at reading that I’d had since my Dick Donovan days. At the
beginning I had no idea how to set about getting hold of books. I thought the only way
was to buy them. That’s interesting, I think. It shows you the difference upbringing
makes. I suppose the children of the middle classes, the 500 pounds a year middle
classes, know all about Mudie’s and the Times Book Club when they’re in their cradles.
A bit later I learned of the existence of lending libraries and took out a subscription at
Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol. And what I read during the next year or so!
Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver
Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna,
May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock,
and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are
kn own to you, I wonder? Half the books that people took seriously in those days are
forgotten now. But at the beginning I swallowed them all down like a whale that’s got in
among a shoal of shrimps. I just revelled in them. After a bit, of course, I grew more
highbrow and began to distinguish between tripe and not-tripe. I got hold of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers and sort of half-enjoyed it, and I got a lot of kick out of Oscar Wilde’s
Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Wells was the author who made the
biggest impression on me. I read George Moore’s Esther Waters and liked it, and I tried
several of Hardy’s novels and always got stuck about half-way through. I even had a go
at Ibsen, who left me with a vague impression that in Norway it’s always raining.
It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with
hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and
Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the
counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer.
If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm.
At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-
learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a
kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life
in a nonnal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really
changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the
rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading.
It really was unspeakably meaningless, that time in 1918. Here I was, sitting beside the
stove in an Army hut, reading novels, and a few hundred miles away in France the guns
were roaring and droves of wretched children, wetting their bags with fright, were being
driven into the machine-gun barrage like you’d shoot small coke into a furnace. I was one
of the lucky ones. The higher-ups had taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug
little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn’t exist. At times I got into a panic and
made sure they’d remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official
forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them
back, and more forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went
on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic’s dream. The effect of all
this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in
everything.
I wasn’t the only one. The war was full of loose ends and forgotten comers. By this time
literally millions of people were stuck up backwaters of one kind and another. Whole
armies were rotting away on fronts that people had forgotten the names of. There were
huge Ministries with hordes of clerks and typists all drawing two pounds a week and
upwards for piling up mounds of paper. Moreover they knew perfectly well that all they
were doing was to pile up mounds of paper. Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the
gallant little Belgium stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good
fellows and hated the French like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff
as mental defectives. A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England, and it even
got as far as Twelve Mile Dump. It would be an exaggeration to say that the war turned
people into highbrows, but it did turn them into nihilists for the time being. People who in
a nonnal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for
themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war. What should I be
now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am.
If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that
unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and
unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.
