Brian Aldiss - A Soldier Erect - or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy

When the fate-deciding list came through, I was not dispatched to Paris. I found myself instead in a North-facing Nissen hut in Prestatyn, on the North Wales coast. The power-that-be had discovered that no man could become proficient in the mysteries of 19 set unless he had been exposed to the ice-filled gales that blew in off the grey waters of Liverpool Bay. While I was undergoing this mixture of technology and meteorology, my mates in the BEF were suddenly plunged into heavy defensive fighting in Belgium, as Hitler’s then invincible divisions rolled through the Low Countries towards France and Paris.

The Mendips were involved in the fighting around Louvain, as a thousand heavy tanks rolled down on them. Many of the friends I knew were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans, while the mangled units retreated to Dunkirk and the coastal ports as best they could. The bad news seeped back to Prestatyn. Guilt and betrayal seemed to be my lot. I got drunk whenever I could afford it, and was always involved in fights.

At the same time, the death of my friends made me a sort of hero. I used to claim – the feeblest and worst of jokes – that France would never have fallen if I had been there to sort things out. Only movement comforted my confusion and, in those terrible young summer days when France was collapsing, movement was everywhere in Britain. The steam trains pulled in and out of stations; evacuees went towards unknown foster-parents; hands waved; women fluttered damp handkerchiefs, and were at once forgotten at unknown destinations. The next day, in another place, you went on parade with a hangover and a bloody eye.

Having completed my operator’s course, I eventually rejoined the unit, then being reformed after Dunkirk. They were short of trained men, and I was given my first stripe. We moved up to the wilds of Yorkshire. Desperately hard up for equipment, we exercised over hills and dales, or endured an endless series of assault courses. The war laboured on, and for some unfathomable reason the seasons took turn and turn-about just as in peacetime, and the invasion of Britain never came.

After a year, I got my second stripe – only to be busted back to signaller a month later for fighting with a private, a great stupid Green Howard I came up against in Richmond. More postings, more trains pulling out of dim platforms, more khaki uniforms in country places. I went back up to corporal, was busted again, and for the same reason – I was drunk and got involved in some prickish quarrel. It did not seem to matter. It was then that one of my mates turned my old joke against me – ‘You’re dead right, Stubby – if you’d been over in Belgium fighting the Jerries, the French would never have given in!’

I couldn’t bear having the piss taken out of me. Remote and evil things happened all over the globe; the blackness in Europe spread eastwards and down into the Balkans. People died and cities burned. In England, there was no Gestapo, only broken sleep and patched underclothing, and lorries rolling throughout the barricaded night. I didn’t care! War is strange: it throws people all together and yet it isolates them from each other. Behind a uniform you can be very impersonal. Even a knee-trembler is generally a solitary gesture against loneliness.

Now I was sick with loneliness again in Kanchapur. How long, oh Lord, how long to the next knee-trembler?

With the taste of the beer and the quarrel with Wally Page still on my tongue, I walked towards the far end of the town, past a row of drivers, each sitting almost motionless in his frail carriage behind a withered horse. Every carriage burned a dim light, every driver called out to me – lazily, coaxingly, seductively – offering to take me where I wanted to go. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Behind the last tonga, half-hidden by tree-shadow, stood a quiet young man. He now stepped forward quickly to my side, grasping my arm with his warm brown hand. His face was heavily pockmarked and he wore a white shirt hanging over blue shorts. A serious-looking young man. With an air of spiritual inquiry, he asked, ‘Why you are walking, sir? You like nice lady for fornication?’

I looked round. Only the tonga-wallahs were within earshot, and they had surely heard it all before.

‘Where is this lady?’

‘Woh, sir, she right close by! Two street only, very near, very nice place! She lie for you now, sir, very pretty. You can come with me look see, sir – just come look see!’ He spread his fingers wide before him, as if to show how open and above-board everything was, her legs included.

‘What’s she like?’ Were we talking about a flesh-and-blood woman?

He could have looked no more serious had he been describing the CO’s daughter. ‘She very lovely girl, sir, pretty face and hands, and body of fine shape and light colour, very very sweet to see.’

‘I bet! What age is she?’

He held my wrist again. ‘You come – I take, and if you no like, no bother, doesn’t matter one litter bit. I t’ink you will like, sir, you see – very nice girl, same many years as you and entirely no ageing in the parts of the body!’

In this broken language of courtship and the fragrance of the evening was something irresistible. Morally pure, my arse! With my heart hammering as if I were already on the job, I said, ‘Okay, just a dekko.’

Of course she would be an old bag …

‘Once you see, sir, you like! Making you much excitement.’

So I delivered myself up for the first time into the hands of the treacherous Indian. Once he saw that I was his, he wasted no more words, moving back among the trees with a gesture that I was to follow him. As soon as he stopped speaking his mottled English, he seemed much more alien, and I went in constant expectation of a cosh on the head.

I had to pursue him down a side lane between two shops, where it was doubly dark and stinking. Narrow though the lane was, people stood there in the blackness. A man called softly to my man, and was answered. A hand slyly felt me as I passed. Even then, on that negligible venture, I was taken by an impulse to dive deeper into this morass of living, to sink into the warrens of India, to disappear for ever from view of all those who had claims on me.

The side lane curved and led into a back street – a street very different in atmosphere from the main one. The main street had a sort of artificial cantonment order to it. This one was narrower, busier, more foetid, less easy to comprehend. This was the real thing, clamorous. We moved into its streams of people, women gliding, porters proceeding at a slow trot, animals going at their own pace. Nobody took any more notice of me, following my man as in a dream, than they did of the sacred cow ambling among the little stalls or the men on ricketty balconies above us, gobbing betel-juice down into the gutters below. The acrid odours, that whining music, reinforced the lustful images in my head. Surely people like this must be at it all the time!

My young man spoke to a boy. The boy said something quickly and went darting away ahead, through the miscellaneous crowd, running as if a tiger was at his heels. My sense of adventure grew; I imagined knives being sharpened for me.

‘Where is this place you’re taking me?’

‘Very soon we come, sir, very near.’

At a corner, a huge deodar was growing. It was difficult to make out in the night and confusion and conflict of shadows. We dived down a side road and from that into a dark, sweet-smelling court. I paused in its black mouth until poor yellow lights gleaming in upper windows allowed me to get my bearings. There was an old tree here, immensely twisted, fainting in the arms of twisted old houses. Silent men were sitting huddled under the tree, smoking – at first I took them for goats, until I made out their cigarette-ends, which glowed intermittently with their breathing.