'What do you f.u.c.king know?'

'You know!'

'What?'

'About that bibi!'

'What about that bibi?'

'Well, you spewed your f.u.c.king ring, didn't you?'

'What do you mean?' I could see him grinning sickly in the dark.

'You know what I mean, mate! How'd you like your mates to know that the great right-winger Stubbs chickened out of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a bibi at the last minute? I watched you! I saw you p.i.s.s off in the other direction when you thought n.o.body was looking!'

With my right fist, I hit him hard in the left ribs; with my left fist, I hit him hard in the right. There was less blubber and more solid meat than I had imagined. He grunted hard, swiped at me and missed. When I stepped back, he did not come on.

'Want any more, you fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d?' I asked.

'You want to get some f.u.c.king service in,' he muttered. With that devastating shot, he turned and disappeared in the direction of the cookhouse.

I stood where I was, knowing that I must move to get on picket in time, trying to collect my emotions.

All round me was the living night, ever present. Our characters were up more than outlines scrawled on the ruined wall of India. It didn't .matter what you did - as long as you weren't found out. Even then, of what significance could our temporary actions be?

Picket was straightforward enough. The moon shone and the night world was beautiful. Of course the ache for women was worse than ever. w.a.n.king did very little to ease it, although it was pleasurable in its own right. The mystery of India - of which I was acutely aware - positively demanded a mysterious woman with whom one could enact the necessary ritual. That night, I did it to myself standing up against a palm tree, rapidly in case I was discovered. Even as the s.p.u.n.k scattered in the dust, my intense vision of warm brown entangling limbs, red lips, and the darker scents of desire vanished; I was left holding a deflating and disappointed p.r.i.c.k.

Disillusion was setting in; we called it 'feeling chokka'. Our amphibious training was strenuous - and the more strenuous it became, the more pointless it felt, although we had then to learn how pointless it really was. At the end of the first week of February, we thankfully left the camp at Vadikhasundi and returned to Kanchapur. Although we greeted pur old haunts with delight, the delight was short-lived.

Out in the wilds, we had acc.u.mulated some back pay. This was soon frittered away in the bazaars on night-dresses for girl-friends, leather wallets that immediately disintegrated, and flashy silk scarves that incurred military discipline if worn. Geordie Wilkinson bought a wrist watch which stopped twenty-three hours later, and we never found the twister that flogged it to him. As we became broke, we became disenchanted. The demon s.e.x was left to fight the military worm, and the worm generally conquered.

Al-thought the dark eyes and tender hot t.i.ts of my mystery girl still beckoned, I dared not defy the MPs again. To be caught would mean real trouble this time and, in a peacetime cantonment like Kanchapur, the police had everything organized.

So we endured the routine of parades, drills, games, and booze-ups, and went slowly round the bend.

No doubt the lists were circulating. It would be a relief when ours came through, whatever it contained - and it could contain nothing good. Meanwhile, we were powerless.

Only on a crippled personal level was some freedom of action possible. Any fears I had that Ron Rusk might spread a lie about my supposed chicken-heartedness at Vadikhasundi vanished. Those swift blows to his ribs had done him a power of good. Whenever I appeared in line with my mess-tins, Rusk would now grin at me and ask, 'h.e.l.lo, Stubby, how are you doing?' - or, even more familiarly, 'How's your belly off for spots?'

All the same, it was necessary to protect a bod's reputation. If you've given yourself a role in life, you've got to act it out. Men without women really go about spare, and I felt spare up to my earholes - especially at this time when I was all health, eagerness, and hard-ons - to find I was debarred from the world's great f.u.c.king match. So I embroidered a bit on what had happened by the Vadikhasundi lake and invented adventures in the Kanchapur bazaar to match the stories of other people's adventures. Yet funnily enough, I could never bring myself to say a word about the little hot girl I had had. I still felt soft about her.

It suited everybody's purpose, in this sterile waiting period, to lie and to believe other people's lies. Even the war situation encouraged fantasy. j.a.panese forces in Burma were still growing, and very little was being done about it. 'Vinegar' Joe Stilwell in the north of the country was making a bit of a show with his Chinese troops, yet the Fourteenth Army just seemed to be sitting on its a.r.s.e, apart from a few skirmishes in the Arakan. We had done our amphibious training, and there was not a man in the unit who had not had his stomach filled with brackish water more than once; so why were we back in Kanchapur, killing time, doing nothing, not going to meet the j.a.ps? What were we meant to be doing?

Naturally we invented lecherous fantasies and 'gripped' at each other. Apart from pontoon, this was how we pa.s.sed the long evenings in barracks.

One of the leaders of the pontoon school was Corporal Warren, a stringy old fellow who always expressed disgust for our stories. After a particularly filthy one from Ginger Oascadden, Warren waved a finger at him and said, 'You're nothink but a b.l.o.o.d.y fool, Gas, mucking about with native women. Many's the time I've seen young lads like you go mad because of women!'

'Young lad! Belt up, Corp, I'm twenty-f.u.c.king-five, got a couple of kids at home!'

'All the more reason for you to watch it I've seen blokes in hot countries go clean round the oojar because of the perverted practices of native women. When I was stationed in Malta -'

'Don't give us that grip, Warry!' someone called.

'When I was stationed in Malta, in Senglea Barracks in Valetta, there was a bloke there called Hunter as shot himself between the eyes with his rifle because of what a native woman done to him.'

'Christ, what did she do?'

'He had only come out from Blighty a couple of months. This was some Arab bint, I believe. See, these native bits of stuff are brought up different to what we are - you ask Aylmer! Ain't that right, Jack?'

'Arr,' said Aylmer, nodding his head so slightly that we could only think that deep experience had almost conferred immobility on him.

'They're brought up different from what we are,' Warren repeated. 'j.a.panese girls, for instance, they sleep with the white of an egg up their holes every night till they're married, and they have to lay very still so it don't run out over the blankets.'

'What do they do that for, for f.u.c.k's sake?' Wally asked, 'It helps keep the hole fresh, doesn't it?'

'What about this bloke in Malta or wherever it was?'

'I tell you, he shot himself - right between the eyes. This Arab bint got some sort of a hold on him. If they really get a man, they aren't satisfied till they've sucked all the good out of him.'

We were all laughing and saying things like 'Don't care if I do go blind!'

They will, they'll suck all the good out of you! So my advice to you, Gas, if you ever want to see your kiddies again, is don't get involved. If you want it so bad, you better go to one of these here gobble-wallahs. You know what they are, don't you? There's a chicko of about seven or eight as hangs about round the Golden Lion restaurant most nights -he's a lot safer than any women and you don't get involved. It's getting involved that causes the trouble.'

'I'm not putting my f.u.c.king d.i.c.k in anybody's mouth,' Geordie said. 'I've sort of got too much respect for my d.i.c.k!'

'If you haven't, no one else has, Geordie!' Dusty Miller said. When we all laughed, Geordie went red.

So we dreamed our sordid dreams, or made them up. Guilt had so invaded the situation that everything was distorted. When we got it, we pretended we hadn't; when we didn't get it, we pretended we had.

Many of the Mendips were having it regular. In our squad, Dave Feather, a greying fatherly man, had a proper arrangement. His father kept a cycle shop in Bristol. Feather had a regular appointment in a shack behind Kanchapur's one garage; a woman turned up there with her pimp to meet him every Sat.u.r.day afternoon. There were rumours that she was somebody important - rumours fed by Feather's way of being very discreet about this arrangement. He neither confirmed nor denied what went on by the garage once a week, and he was not the sort of bloke you pressed.

His oblique att.i.tude, hinting at great things without actually claiming anything, was easy to imitate, doing good service for many who hoped humbly to pa.s.s as s.e.xual athletes: for the life-distorting barrack-room ethos, to which all were supposed to conform, demanded that s.p.u.n.k should be shed somehow, anyhow, as often as beer was drunk. Our sergeants had one well used tag-line when they let us knock off fatigues for a ten-minute rest: 'Right, break off for a smoke! Them as can't smoke go through the motions!' With s.e.x, the same conformity was expected.

This fantasy-barrier was acknowledged in one or two pet cliches. That old saw, Them as talks most does least' was frequently bandied about, valued as much for its symmetry as its wisdom. It overlooked the fact that many of the brigade's most arrant lechers, who had been known to f.u.c.k anything on four, three, two, one, or - since mangoes have no legs - no legs, said almost nothing that was not a disordered flow of verbal l.u.s.t There was no rule that helped understanding of anyone's s.e.xual life beyond this: that all men lied and distorted what they did. The process was often unthinking, a helpless response to the distortions of the system in which they grew up and grew old.

Self-aggrandizement was the commonest form of self-defence.

You always made yourself out better than you were. This was so commonly acknowledged that any attempt at reminiscence was immediately attacked. When Corporal Warren started to say, 'When I was stationed in Malta', several voices cried 'Grip on!', as if they feared that the self-inflations which must inevitably follow would somehow deflate them.

The a.s.sumption was that anyone speaking on any occasion when no checks on the accuracy of his statement were available would be bound to lie.

This I say with hindsight; at the time, I was just a BOR, eager not to think or feel. But I enjoyed listening to the stories Warren, Aylmer, and the other old soldiers told, Lies I could take - my old love, Virginia, had acclimatized me to them; it was the truth that came hard.

During this waiting time in Kanchapur, Geordie Wilkinson became pally with old Jack Aylmer, who did orderly duties and suffered from bad feet. I had taken an interest in Aylmer long before. Aylmer had one line of a song he sang, always the same line of the same song, which he left suspended in the air in a melancholy way: 'Could I but see thee stand before me.. .'

This line haunted me. It was a s.n.a.t.c.h from the Flower Song from Carmen, and powerful enough to invest Aylmer with a whole history. I saw him as incredibly old - and indeed he must have been in his late thirties - with an ageing wife whom he loved very much; they lived together in a little cottage in Cornwall, the windows of which caught the spray from the Atlantic in rough water. He had been in some profession, a solicitor perhaps, had failed at it, and now eked out a living, ably supported by his dear wife, as a market-gardener. The war had parted them and she had gone to live with a draper, but he never forgot her and sang his line of song to her over and over again.

Tickled by this vision of comic pathos, I took to drinking with Aylmer and Geordie in the WVS canteen.

Of course, Aylmer's background as it emerged was not at all as I had pictured it. He came of a large family who lived above a hairdresser's shop in the Fulham Road, had worked in a gla.s.s factory, and moreover bore a picture of a biplane tattooed on his left b.u.t.tock.

The attraction about Aylmer was that he was a gripper. He was generally disliked for this quality, and had few friends. No sooner did he begin a sentence 'Back in 1936-', or 'When the Mendips were in the Near East-' than cries of 'He's gripping again!' would arise to silence him. Geordie and I, however, could tolerate his grips. He blossomed and told us marvellous tales of service life in odd parts of the globe. His self-aggrandizement was subtle, lying less in the stories - which were generally impersonal - than in the unspoken claim to omniscience behind them.

At the time, I had no means of knowing whether the things Aylmer told us were true or not: that on Malta, where the Mendips had been stationed, there was a four-thousand year-old prehistoric palace where human sacrifices were still carried out; that Chinese girls made the best mistresses; that several thousand BORs had deserted from the Army in India rather than go to Burma and lived hidden lives in the big cities; that in certain African tribes, the women were circ.u.mcized and had their c.l.i.torises removed; that Churchill got a payment of fifty pounds for every tank that bore his name; that in the wastelands behind Aden there was a temple now covered with sand which was full of gold dating from the time of the Crusades; that a Burmese tribe near Lashio ate a certain food which was deadly poison and then followed it down with another equally deadly which neutralized the first; that the respected Chiang Kai-shek, our Chinese ally, was a secret Fascist; that some day the Mendips were going to have to liberate Singapore from the sea approach; that Hindu mothers w.a.n.ked off their boy-children to keep them happy and quiet; that a friend of Aylmer's, a truck-driver, had been stabbed in his sleep the day after he had knocked down and killed a sacred cow wandering across the road; that another friend had died in his sleep when a deadly little krait, a small snake, slithered into his bed and bit him; that yet another friend, serving on detachment on the North-West Frontier, had had his blanket stolen from under him by the Pathans as he slept; that the Indians had invited j.a.pan to invade and free them from the British and that Gandhi was in touch with Hirohito; that there were caves near Bombay filled with incredible erotic sculptures - voluptuous women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like melons being f.u.c.ked all ways by men and animals - which could so easily drive you mad that only officers above the rank of captain were allowed in; that as you sailed into Colombo harbour on a calm day, you could see an old East Indiaman sunk in clear water at the entrance to the harbour; that Gandhi liked young girls; that there were gay parrots flying among the trees in southern India which had been taught to speak Tamil by the locals; that the Americans wanted to take over the British Empire; that a j.a.panese soldier was issued with half a capful of rice a day and nothing more; that the Gurkhas were the best soldiers in the world and must be treated like whites; that prost.i.tution was regarded as holy in many parts of the world, including Greece and Persia; that the third largest church dome in the world was on Malta; that there was a battalion of Poles serving in India who had walked to Delhi over the Himalayas from Poland when it was over-run by the n.a.z.is, a distance of several thousand miles across the worst country in the world; that Hitler had got syphilis; that most of the past kings of England had also had syphilis, which accounted for the king's stutter; that the Pope had caught syphilis from one of his cardinal's wives; that the Yankee Air Force could not find its targets at night like the RAF, and so was confined to daylight raids; that the Italian army took droves of wh.o.r.es with them wherever they went; that there was a castle in the Highlands of Ethiopia built entirely from the skulls of some army ma.s.sacred there in battle; that when the Ark Royal sank, a powerful British secret weapon went down with it; that the Americans were preparing a secret weapon that would blow Berlin off the map; that an octopus will die immediately if you bite it between the eyes; that near Mandalay stood a town as big as Brighton built entirely of paG.o.das of various sizes; that Malta is all that is left of a land-bridge between Europe and Africa; that Churchill had delayed the Second Front in the hope that Hitler would defeat Russia; that by inserting a sixpence into a woman's twot you could tell if she had VD, because the coin would then turn green; that either Kipling or Noel Coward had written 'Eskimo Nell'; and many other subjects upon which I was either totally uninformed or needed enlightenment.

Aylmer was a treasure-house of information and misinformation, like many another old soldier. I had a feeling that if I could only remember all that he said, I could master the entire world picture. He gave me confirmation that the world was as complex as I was beginning to suspect, full of conspiracies and contradictions and irreconcilables.

Yet the other squaddies always shut Aylmer up with their cry of 'Grip on!'

'They just don't want to b.l.o.o.d.y know,' Geordie said when we discussed the matter. "They'll never listen to anybody, like. They know f.u.c.k all and they want to keep it that way. As long as they sort of stay b.l.o.o.d.y pigiggerant, they're thik-hai. That's what I reckon, anyroad....'

Geordie was probably right. Part of the Army philosophy was to simplify everything down to basics, from furnishings and food to routine.

'I suppose you don't know anything about the Hindu G.o.ds - Hanuman and so on?' I asked Aylmer, when Geordie and I were having a mango ice cream with him one evening in the bazaar.

'I don't know much about it, Stubby. The whole Hindu religion is so involved that you can't make anything of it unless you are actually born a Hindu. Some white professors have gone mad studying the ins-and-outs of it.'

'Even Stubby wouldn't want to go as far as that!' Geordie said, and we laughed.

'Have they got a leading G.o.d? There seem to be so many of them''

'The two leading ones are Siva and Vishnu. Vishnu represents law and order - sort of a provost-marshal. Siva stands for destruction and regeneration.'

'He's the pansy-looking one with the flute?'

'That's supposed to be how he looks sometimes. Sometimes he takes other forms. They can change around as they feel like it.'

'It sounds a funny sort of religion to me, though the one with the flute-thing looks quite nice,' Geordie said. 'I mean to say, are the G.o.ds good or bad?'

They're a mixture. Some G.o.ds are good and bad, just like humans, and then there are demons and everything.'

Geordie laughed. 'What a lot of primitive superst.i.tion! I mean, you've got to admit, it is sort of f.u.c.king primitive!'

'Yeah, it's a bit primitive, because it's been going on like this in India now for ten thousand years or more with no change at all. It's responsible for the caste system, is Hinduism, in the same way the Church of England is responsible for the cla.s.s system in Blighty, only of course it's worse here. Myself, I think Queen Victoria was wrong to say the British shouldn't meddle with religious beliefs in India. The Wogs are not going to progress, as far as I can see, till the whole subcheeze of their religion is swept away.'

'I bet the b.l.o.o.d.y j.a.ps would sweep it away - I mean, if they invaded India and took it over, like,'

Geordie said, his Adam's apple bobbing and his hands waving as he sought to convey a complex idea. 'I mean to say, they wouldn't be like Stubby here, like. He's dotty on them Wog G.o.ds, aren't you. Stubby, me old oppo?'

Aylmer had seen the picture of Hanuman above my char-poy. I had made a sketch of him, too, and later I had bought a picture of Parvati, the pretty pink wife of Siva, posturing in sugary fashion on a water-lily leaf Parvati came from the stall-keeper who had sold me the monkey G.o.d. Later I bought from him an incarnation of Vishnu as Narasimha, with a lion's face and many arms. These three amazing creatures all stared out at the Mendips from above my bunk, glowing between Jinx Falkenberg and Ida Lupino.

'Stubby draws them, too,' Geordie said. 'You know, copies them, like. I reckon it's bad for him - a fine young lad like him.'

Geordie looked anxiously at me, in case I thought he was taking the micky too hard.

'You're a bit of an artist, are you?' Aylmer said. He had a small sandy moustache which he pressed into his upper lip now and again.

'It's just to amuse myself.' I felt embarra.s.sed. But personal confession was not in Aylmer's line; he preferred general discourse.

'Although all these Hindu G.o.ds are so ancient and uncivilized, the odd thing is that Sigmund Freud, the German who invented psycho-a.n.a.lysis, found that we have all these G.o.ds and demons, like, in our own minds.'

'What, Hindu G.o.ds?' I exclaimed. 'I'd never heard of any of them till I came to this f.u.c.king place.'

'I don't mean literally, you nut, but the things they stand for, good and bad and all the rest. Sin and s.e.x and all that. You know we're supposed to be descended from the same tribe as the Indians, so we have the same basic beliefs, like.'

This was too much even for me. 'f.u.c.k off, Aylmer! You mean to tell me we think the same as these Wogs? Then how is it we don't all go round barefoot at home, spitting betel nut?'

'I've seen kids going round barefoot at home,' Geordie observed. 'You want to come up Jarrow way, you do!'

'Look, I'll explain what I mean,' Aylmer said patiently.

He began to do so, but at that moment, strolling up the street whistling, came Wally Page, Enoch Ford and young Jackie Tertis. We exchanged whistles and insults with them, and then sloped down to join them. They were going to get p.i.s.sed in the canteen, they said.

'What are you hanging about with Aylmer for?' Wally asked. 'b.l.o.o.d.y old know-all!'

The Indians in the restaurant stood anxiously by until we paid the bill and moved off towards barracks.

The purple air was as warm as ever; fruit bats circled in the tall jacarandas that lined the road to the barracks. Once I looked back to see where Aylmer was. He was following along behind the group, two or three paces back. Once I heard him utter his only line of song.

'Could I but see thee stand before me...'

Two hours later, we were all pretty well slewed - except Aylmer, who had gone to bed. We were laughing and shouting good night to each other. Geordie was singing Bless 'Em All.

This, I thought rosily, this was true comradeship! Even old Geordie was better with a few beers in him.

What particularly appealed - though I was far from a.n.a.lysing it that night, and many succeeding ones - was everyone's lack of pretension. At public school, at b.l.o.o.d.y Branwells, our cla.s.s instincts were so fierce that we rarely spoke about our home-life:; the ban, strong but unspoken, operated particularly against parents, those bringers of Life and Cla.s.s; they were so firmly tabu that you referred to them - when you were forced to refer to them at all - as My People. As if they were stuffed with formaldehyde and kept ih a jar.

With Wally and Enoch and Carter the Farter and the lads, it was otherwise. They revealed crude details about their home-life that thrilled and shocked me. Wally in particular! Wally had actually f.u.c.ked girls behind the sofa in his own home. His parents were often drunk - his mother had once set light to the net curtain and the house had nearly burnt down. His sister used to let the old man from next door feel her in the outside bog, in exchange for sweets. And his father! - Page senior, from Wally's inconsequential account, was an embodiment of l.u.s.ty lower-cla.s.s life, a factory hand who fought people in boozers and at football matches, had shaken his fist at their Member of Parliament, had driven a car over a cliff, and, having been caught by Wally f.u.c.king a neighbour's daughter up against the wall of a boozer after closing time, had uttered this immortal piece of advice: Don't you 'ang round 'ere sniffing at my crumpet - you're old enough to sniff out your own crumpet.''

This utter abandonment of standards thrilled me. Over our beers, Wally and Enoch were trading tales of girls they had had, in the army and put of it. On this topic, they were true buddies - only on politics did they divide, when Enoch propounded Communism and Wally spoke up for Winston Churchill and the king. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to relate my own s.e.xual chronicles, though I cursed myself for my squeamishness; about Virginia and Esmeralda at least I still felt a great deal of sentiment, and sentiment seemed to be precisely what Wally and Enoch were free from. Their pushers, their bits of skirt, were evidently dispatched with amazing aplomb, in an absent-minded sue-: cession of blow-throughs. Or so they told it.

Although I admired this freedom from the lame tradition in which I had been brought up - the tradition whereby a girl was supposed to be loaded with chocolates, fair words and moonlight first - I was unable to hide a feeling that these quick f.u.c.ks here and there had been remarkably perfunctory, not to say brief.

The object always seemed to be to: come your muck, as Enoch called it, as fast as possible. Once, someone mentioned that the Hindus stretched their love-making out for perhaps an hour at a time.

'Dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!' Wally said. ' "Whip it in, whip it out, and wipe it", that's my motto.'

The one reservation to my admiration which I would admit at this time was that Wally and Enoch, like many others whose stories I listened to, were apparently completely blind to the look of the girl's face.

'She were an ugly cow, but by Christ she could f.u.c.k!' was Enoch's summary of one woman he had had in the factory where he worked. This blindness extended amazingly to an indifference to the woman's body. I often wondered if Wally - or any of the others - had ever contemplated a girl's naked body and been moved by the sight, They seemed to have had so many opportunities and squandered them so recklessly.

For all that, surely quant.i.ty was a good subst.i.tute for quality? By the time we broke up that evening, Enoch giving his extraordinary whoop of 'Honey pears!', I was once more full of envy of their free way of life.

I wove my way to the s.h.i.tter, to find that young Jackie Tertis was there before me, his round baby face gleaming with sweat.