Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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saw you! I heard you! You were communicating, you horrible little man, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, Staff.’
Hardy imposed Punishment Diet Number One, bread and ‘desert soup’, in a solitary cell for three days. Stating that it took two to communicate, he charged Bill Farrell with listening and gave him the same sentence. Three days later, the two prisoners returned to the communal cell chastened and starving.
In the parade square one afternoon, harsh sunlight glowing off the white walls made Bain squint. Suddenly, Staff Sergeant Pickering called out, ‘You there! What do you think you’re grinning at?’ Bain thought Pickering was speaking to someone else, until he closed on Bain’s ear: ‘You horrible man! Answer when I ask you a question. What do you find so funny? Why were you grinning?’
‘I wasn’t grinning, Staff.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘I was frowning. The sun was in my eyes. I’ve got fuck all to laugh at.’
‘You’re right! You’ve got fuck-all to laugh at. And you’ll have a bit less tomorrow when you’re on jockey’s diet.’
The next morning in Captain Babbage’s office, RSM Grant read out the charge: ‘Smiling on Parade’, Bain pleaded to Babbage, ‘I wasn’t smiling, Sir. The sun was in my eyes. I was frowning.’
‘If the Staff Sergeant says you were smiling,’ Babbage replied, ‘that’s what you were doing.’ He sentenced him to three days on Punishment Diet Number One in solitary confinement.
The isolation cell, on the upstairs floor in one of the barracks, measured six by eight feet. Three blankets, a piss-pot and a bucket of water lay on the stone floor. When Staff Sergeant Hardy locked him in, Bain thought, ‘I’ve got to stay here for three days, seventy-two hours, with nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to look at. I shall go mad.’
Bain squatted on the ground and thought back to the first book of poems he had ever read, Algernon Methuen’s Anthology of Modern Verse. With the fond recollection of a first love, he saw his teenaged self opening the book at Thomas Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’. (‘When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay …’) Reading a sequence of Hardy poems had afforded a kind of pleasure he had not known before. The next poem he had read was Walter de la Mare’s ‘Farewell’, which he whispered to himself in the cell:
When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?
Reciting verse eased the first hours of idleness and solitude. He was soon recalling when and where he had discovered various poets. T. S. Eliot and A. E. Housman came in the winter of 1938, during the Junior Amateur Boxing Association Championship at the Holborn Stadium Club. His thoughts wandered forward to ‘that long and golden summer of 1940 … a lyrical interlude of sheer pagan bliss’ in the arms of a girl named Barbara. Where, he wondered, was she? He feared she ‘was probably bringing comfort and joy to some well-hung G.I.’. Putting her out of his mind, he paced the cell. There were four more hours until the evening slice of dry bread.
Bain had until then resisted the temptation to hate the guards, keeping at bay emotions that he believed self-destructive. But hunger for food and books was forcing him to despise Pickering. Even if ‘Smiling on Parade’ had been a legitimate cause for a penalty, Bain had not been smiling. He had not done anything. Childlike rage consumed him, and he sought an outlet in imagined acts of revenge.
He saw himself after the war, walking up to Pickering in a pub. He would ask the former staff sergeant whether he recognized him. Pickering would say no. Bain would answer, ‘Does Mustafa, Alexandria mean anything to you?’ As Pickering made for the exit, Bain would grab him by the arm. At the moment of retribution, reality intervened in the form of commands barked by the staff sergeants outside.
Bain was suddenly ‘embarrassed, even a little ashamed, as if his fantasizing had been observed.’ As the hours passed, filling time challenged his imagination. He tried to name a novelist for each letter of the alphabet, ‘then a composer, then a boxer, a poet, a cricketer, a politician and so on …’ Hardy opened the door, threw him his evening slice of bread and said, ‘Try not to make a pig of yourself.’ The guard taunted Bain with that night’s menu at the sergeants’ mess: steak, fried potatoes, salad, fruit, cheese and, afterwards, drinks in the bar. ‘How’s that sound?’
‘It sounds very nice, Staff.’
‘You fancy yourself, don’t you? You think you’re a fly man. Well, you’re not. You’re nothing. You’re nobody. And let me tell you this. There’s a few of us got our eyes on you … So, watch your step, my lad, or you’re going to get a lot worse than PD One.’
That evening, an unexpected act of near-kindness by Staff Sergeant Brown plunged Bain into confusion. Brown came into the cell just before lights out and told him to get his blankets ready for the night. ‘I’d use one of them for a pillow if I was you,’ he said, ‘and keep your clothes on. Gets cold in the night.’ Brown’s words, so unexpected, hinted at something ‘approaching humanity’. When the cell went dark, Bain regretted Brown’s solicitude. Clinging to the purity of his hatred, he curled into a foetal position with his head on a folded blanket and thought, ‘Fuck ’em all, including Brown.’
Staff Sergeant Henderson woke him in the morning with another piece of bread. Bain kept half of it to eat later. When Henderson returned to the cell, he seized the leftover bread. ‘You’ve been hoarding food. You expecting a siege or something?’ Bain’s fists clenched, but he kept them at his sides. ‘Don’t you look at me like that, lad!’ Henderson exited the cell before Bain could move.
Alone without the food he had saved, Bain was more outraged with himself than with Henderson. His inaction made him feel cowardly:
All right, he thought, they were right, the commandant and the rest of them. He was a coward. If he hadn’t been a coward he would have knocked Henderson’s dirty teeth down his throat. He hadn’t done it because he was afraid. He was afraid of the consequences: the body-belt, that wide leather waist-band with a steel cuff on either side to pin the prisoner’s hands down so that he was a man without arms, defenceless against the time they crept, silent at night on plimsolled feet, to burst into the cell and use him as a punch-bag and a football … He was afraid.
Bain was closer to despair than at any other time since his arrest. But it struck him that Henderson’s eyes had betrayed fear. The staff sergeant had left the cell quickly, much faster than usual. If Henderson taunted him again, ‘He’d smash the bastard.’ Henderson did not taunt him again.
The treatment meted out to him earned a mention in his poem ‘Compulsory Mourning’:
You’ll be confined in darkness and we’ll not
Allow you more than two hours’ light each day.
You’ll be on bread and water. There you’ll stay
For three full days and nights and we shall find,
I think, that this will concentrate the mind …
Bain returned to the communal cell after his three days’ isolation, secure in the knowledge that he had survived PD One and could do it again.
No news reached the inmates, apart from what little seeped through in censored letters from their families. Bain did not know that his friend Hughie Black and the rest of the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders were fighting that summer in Sicily. After Bain left them at Wadi Akarit, the Gordons had advanced north up the Tunisian coast. Tunis fell on 12 May 1943, ending the North African campaign. The 51st Highland Infantry Division disembarked for Malta on