Something Wholesale. Eric Newby
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had told me to take that smile off my face. Then, at least, I had been a soldier in embryo. Now, wearing a suit of battle dress that had been made for a giant, sprinkled liberally with delousing powder, which the authorities at Brussels had thought necessary before allowing me out to eat an ersatz gooseberry tart on Boulevard Anspach, I resembled nothing human, civil or military.
En masse, my companions and I were not objects of compassion. Ten days of liberty during which we had roamed the countryside of Saxony, searching for food that the local farmers had been too terrified to withhold from us, had so inflated our faces that they resembled grotesque balloons at a carnival, in startling contrast with our emaciated bodies, which were concealed by our uniforms.
Unlike the returned prisoner of popular imagination we were heavily laden: with kitbags stuffed with coats and great rubber riding mackintoshes bought at officers’ shops along the route, and with long woollen underpants that had been pressed upon us by helping organisations. In addition I was encumbered with a number of scientific instruments which I had looted from a German experimental station, under the impression that they would make my fortune, and, heaviest of all to bear, an anxiety neurosis brought on by my failure to complete, before liberation, a petit-point fire screen, one of thousands sent out by the Red Cross with the express purpose of allaying anxiety neurosis. I still have the instruments. No one has ever been able to tell me what they are intended for. I burned the fire screen and felt better for having done so.
It began to rain heavily. ‘Officers this way,’ said a sergeant from the disembarkation staff and we trailed after him under the arc lights, across greasy railway tracks on which tank engines hissed with steam up, to a long, low, wooden hut. Inside the other ranks were already eating bacon and eggs and drinking tea which was being served to them by cheerful, common ATS.
We were given tea by members of a more fashionable volunteer organisation whose roots were deep in S.W.7. They seemed more interested in the effect that they were producing on a number of men, who had not seen an English woman for anything up to five years, than in producing the victuals for which we still craved.
‘Do you know Jamie Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon in the Scots Guards? I think he was with you.’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Or Binkie Martyn-Sikes?’
‘No!’
‘How very odd that you shouldn’t have known him. He’s my second cousin.’
‘Do you think it would be possible for me to have something to eat?’
‘Oh, how stupid of me. It’s been so interesting talking to you I quite forgot.’
Whilst we were eating a Colonel entered. He was large, with a face as red as the tabs on his lapels.
‘Carry on, gentlemen,’ he said, genially. No one had in fact stopped. His costume was an unconvincing parody of a panoply which I now associated with a long-dead past. Neither breeches nor boots were as those worn by the terrifying but beautiful Eddie, our Adjutant at Sandhurst. Particularly the boots; they were downat-heel as though they had been worn over-much on urban pavements.
He sat himself down on the edge of one of the tables and tapped his awful boots with a little swagger cane.
‘Before you chaps move on from here,’ he said with a bonhomie which we found extremely distasteful, ‘there is just one thing I would like to say to you.
‘We realise here that things have been pretty rough for you on the other side. The Hun’s finished, now it’s our turn. I expect you saw some pretty rotten things – atrocities. I happen to be the Commandant of a P.O.W. Camp at—(he named a place somewhere remote in East Anglia). I’m also,’ he added, surprisingly, ‘a Member of Parliament. If you’ve witnessed any kind of atrocity in the last few years I would like you to report it to me, now. I promise you that whatever you tell me here will be brought home to the men in my camp. They’ll sweat it out.’
It had been a long day. I thought of the journey we had made through Belgium. There had been a shortage of rolling stock and we had entrained in carriages intended for the transportation of German prisoners. The windows were festooned with barbed wire. At the halts, which were numerous, small boys had thrown stones at us under the impression that we were members of the opposition. Who was to blame them? I thought of Germany – how I loathed pine trees and Alsatian dogs. I thought of the camp near Munich: the S.S. stripping Yugoslav men and women, kicking them round the compound in the snow and later singing harmoniously together in their huts, full of gemütlichkeit. I had seen a lot of things and this was too much.
Finally, an officer, who had been captured with the Rifle Brigade at Calais in 1940, got to his feet.
‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I have two observations to make. The first is that you yourself are, without doubt, the biggest atrocity I have seen in the last five years. Secondly, the sooner there is a by-election in your constituency the better.
‘And in case,’ he went on, ‘you are now thinking of having me placed under arrest I will tell you that I have not yet been medically examined and I am probably quite insane – and that, Colonel, goes for everyone else in this room.’
There was a long, long train journey from Tilbury to Sussex without changing – a tour-de-force only possible in time of total war; the train stopping in the small hours of the morning at a disused platform deep in the bowels of Holborn viaduct.
‘Hasn’t been used since 1918,’ said the guard. He stood on the platform ankle deep in black soot, the accumulation of twenty-seven years, whilst those of us who lived in London argued whether or not to abandon the train and take taxis.
‘Can’t get a taxi in London after midnight – Yanks,’ said a gloomy looking Major with a handlebar moustache and little tufts of ginger hair growing out of his cheeks. ‘Had a letter from m’brother.’ At dawn the train crept into Barnes Station. I lived at Hammersmith Bridge, five minutes away by bus. It seemed ridiculous not to get out. I started assembling my extraordinary luggage. ‘Chap told me at Tilbury,’ the hairy Major said, ‘that they’re giving out special food and clothing coupons at Repatriation Centres.’
The train moved forward with a shattering jerk. Once more the house where I was born receded into the distance.
The Repatriation Centre was two Nissen huts in the middle of a wood somewhere in Sussex. It was staffed entirely by escaped prisoners of war, most of whom we already knew. In one hour dead they had us medically examined, documented and back at the station.
‘You get two months’ leave. Personally I don’t think that anyone will ever want to see you again,’ said the C.O. He had been in the same squad with me at Sandhurst. ‘The thing is,’ he said, slipping effortlessly back into the idiom, ‘you look so very, very idul.’
CHAPTER TWO An Afternoon at Throttle and Fumble
‘It’s not the slightest use hanging about here all day doing nothing,’ my mother said firmly. ‘You’re becoming demoralised.’ She had come into the bedroom where I was skulking unhappily for what she called ‘a little talk’.
My leave was not proving to be as pleasant as I had expected it to be. Most of the girls I knew were in jobs they refused to discuss, alleging that they were ‘secret’. (At that time it was fashionable to be in something secret even though you were issuing camp beds at the White City.) By day I had been forced back on the company of a succession of predatory widows, who drew false hope from my air of melancholy and who listened with awe to the rumbling noises made by a stomach which had been unable to stand the strain of liberation. My friends all seemed to be prisoners of war, busy like me nursing their private neuroses and we had so much in common that we used to cross the road to avoid meeting one another.
Even the Army seemed to have lost interest. Four days after I arrived home I received a letter from a remote camp