The Sheik and the Dustbin. George Fraser MacDonald
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him. Letters weren’t the same as being able to talk to and touch someone who’d been with Jack or Billy; it was a great reassurance in those days.
So, apart from a commission to buy the Colonel half a dozen of his favourite Lovat pipes (“and don’t let them fob you off with any damned Bulldogs or patent puffers, d’you hear?”) I had four or five addresses to call at in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. That was after I had undergone the extraordinary experience of “coming home from the war”, which must differ from person to person, I suppose, but is like nothing else in life. For this young soldier, unmarried and unattached, it was a going home to parents, a wonderful elated reunion full of laughter and babbling and maternal tears, and aunts exclaiming, and father shaking his head and grinning with satisfaction before going through to his surgery, bursting quietly with the news for his patients, and my MacNeill grandmother, ninety-three years old, bright-eyed and laughing softly in Gaelic as she preened herself in the Arab shawl I had brought her. (I wonder if she remembered my MacDonald grandmother’s remark to her as they listened together to Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939: “Well, Mrs MacNeill, the men will be going away again.” Only a Highland matriarch would put it quite like that. If my MacNeill grandmother did remember, she was probably reflecting that now the last of the men was home; the first ones she had seen returning, as a little girl, had been from the Crimea.)
It was very happy, but it was strange. They looked the same to me, of course, but now and then I realised that they were recognising the boy of 18 whom they remembered, in this much bigger, sunburned young man of 21. That’s an odd feeling. So is standing alone in the quiet of your room, just as you remember it but a little smaller, staring at each familiar thing of childhood and thinking: that day of the Sittang ambush … that terrible slow-motion moment at Kinde Wood when the section went down around you in the cross-fire … that night when the Japs came up the Yindaw road, the little ungainly figures in the light of the burning trucks, passing by only a few yards away … that hectic slashing mêlée at the bunkers under the little gold pagoda where L—bought his lot and J—had his hat shot off and the ground was dark and wet with blood - while all that was happening, a world and a lifetime away, this was here: the quiet room, just as it had always been, just as it is now. The porcupine-quill inkstand that the old man brought home from East Africa, the copy of Just William with its torn spine, the bail you broke with your fast ball against Transitus (it must have been cheap wood), the ink-stain low down on the wallpaper that you made (quite deliberately) when you were eight… Nothing changed, except you. Never call yourself unlucky again.
I couldn’t sleep in bed that night. I did something I hadn’t done since Burma, except on a few night exercises: I went out into the garden with a blanket and rolled up under a bush. God knows why. It wasn’t affectation -1 took good care that no one knew - nor was it sheer necessity, nor mere silliness in the exuberance of homecoming. At the time I felt it was a sort of gesture of thanksgiving, and only much later did I realise it was probably a reluctance to “come home” to a life that I knew there could be no return to, now. Anyway, I didn’t sleep a bloody wink.
After just a few days at home (which was in Northern England) I took off for Scotland. My excuse was that I had to make the visits I had promised, but the truth was I was restless and impatient. Three years of adventure - because there’s no other word for that kaleidoscope of travel and warfare and excitement and change in strange lands among weird exotic peoples - had done its work, and once the elation of just being home, so long dreamed of, had passed, there was the anticlimax, the desire to be off and doing again. It was no big psychological deal of the kind you see in movies; I wasn’t battle-happy, or “mentally scarred”, or hung up with guilt, nor did patrols of miniature Japanese brew up under my bed (as happened to one of my section whenever we came out of the line: we used to tell him to take his kukhri to them, and when he had done so to his satisfaction, swearing and carving the air, we all went back to sleep again, him included). It was just that my life was now outside that home of boyhood, and I would never settle there again. Of course no word of this was said, but I’m sure my parents knew. Parents usually do.
I was nearly two weeks in Scotland, staying at small hotels and making my afternoon calls on families who had been forewarned of my coming; it was a succession of front-rooms and drawing-rooms, with the best tea-service and sandwiches and such extravagance of scones and home-made cakes as rationing allowed (I had to remind myself to go easy on the sugar, or I would have cleaned them out), while I was cross-examined about Drew or Angus or Gordon, and photographs of the poor perishers were trotted out which would have curled their toes under, and quiet aunts listened rapt in the background, and younger brothers and sisters regarded me with giggling awe. They were such nice folk, kind, proper, hanging on every word about their sons, tired after the war, touchingly glad that I had come to see them. It was fascinating, too, to compare the parents with the young men I knew, to discover that the dashing and ribald Lieutenant Grant was the son of a family so douce that they said grace even before afternoon tea; that the parents of the urbane Captain D—, who had put him through Merchiston and Oxford, lived in a tiny top-floor flat in Colinton; and that Second Lieutenant Hunter, a pimply youth with protruding teeth, had a sister who was a dead ringer for Linda Darnell (and whose R. A.F. fiancé stuck to her like glue all through tea).
But the most interesting calls were the last two. The first was to a blackened tenement in Glasgow’s East End, where McGilvray’s widowed mother lived with his invalid great-uncle, on the third floor above a mouldering close with peeling walls, urchins screaming on the stairs, and the green tramcars clanging by. Inside, the flat was bright and neat and cosy, with gleaming brass, a kettle singing on the open black-leaded grate, an old-fashioned alcove bed, and such a tea on the table as I had not seen yet, with gingerbread and Lyle’s golden syrup. Mrs McGilvray was a quick, anxious wee Glasgow body, scurrying with the tea-pot while Uncle chuckled and made sly jokes at her; he was a small wheezy comedian with a waxed moustache and a merry eye, dressed in his best blue serge with a flower in his buttonhole and a gold watch-chain across his portly middle; he half-rose to greet me, leaning on a stick and gasping cheerfully, called me “l’tenant”, informed me that he had been in the H.L.I, in the first war, and wha’ shot the cheese, hey? (This is a famous joke against my regiment.) When he had subsided, wiping his eye and chuckling “Ma Goad, ma Goad”, Mrs McGilvray questioned me nervously across the tea-cups: was Charlie well? Was Charlie behaving himself? Was Charlie giving me any bother? Was Charlie saving his pay or squandering it on drink, cards, and loose women? (This was actually a series of questions artfully disguised, but that was their purport.) Was Charlie attending Church? Was he taking care? Were his pals nice boys?
“In Goad’s name, wumman,” cried Uncle, “let the man get his tea! Yattety-yattety-yattety! Cherlie’s fine! Thur naethin’ wrang wi’ him. Sure that’s right, L’tenant?”
“He’s fine,” I said, “he’s a great lad.”
“There y’are! Whit am Ah aye tellin’ ye? The boy’s fine!”
“Aye, well,” said Mrs McGilvray, looking down at her cup. “I aye worry aboot him.”
“Ach, women!” cried Uncle, winking at me. “Aye on aboot their weans. See yersel’ anither potato scone, L’tenant. Ma Goad, ma Goad.”
“Does he …” Mrs McGilvray hesitated, “does he … do his work well? I mean … looking after you, Mr MacNeill?”
“Oh, indeed he does. I think I’m very lucky.”
“Ah’d sooner hae a cairter lookin’ efter me!” wheezed Uncle. “Heh-heh! Aye, or a caur conductor! Ma Goad, ma Goad.’
“Wheesht, Uncle! Whit’ll Mr MacNeill think?”
“He’ll think yer an auld blether, gaun on aboot Cherlie! The boy’s no’ a bairn ony langer, sure’n he’s no’. He’s a grown man.” He glinted at me. “Sure that’s right? Here … will ye tak’ a wee dram, L’tenant? Ach, wheesht, wumman - can Ah no’ gie the man a right drink, then? His tongue’ll be hingin’ oot!” At his insistence she produced a decanter, shaking her head, apologising, while he cried to gie the man a decent dram, no’ just dirty his gless. He beamed on me.
“Here’s