Brian Aldiss - Pale Shadow of Science

To cheer us up, Fangby took us out. He drove us over to Wroxham, where the bad meat came from, where there was a cinema. I still remember the excitement of being out that night, of speed, of seeing the willows flash by and vanish forever from the blaze of the headlights.

We went to see a film version of Lorna Doone , the boring novel of which we had read. The film was better. John Ridd fought Carver Doone, and Carver Doone fell back into an Exmoor bog and sank slowly down, down into the bog. It compelled our imaginations for a long while.

Legge was caught in his own personal bog. He did something which Fangby found unforgiveable. What it could have been still escapes conjecture. Was he caught smoking? I do not remember that any of us had cigarettes in a world where even ice cream was forbidden. Was he caught masturbating, or even in bed with another boy? With the Italian boy? It seems unlikely. We knew nothing about sex. We were still at an age when we were uninterested in our own or other penises. When Roger returned at the beginning of one term to say he had been in bed with his sister and she had told him that cocks went into the wee-wee hole and produced children, we were shocked by such coarseness, and gave him six with his own cricket bat.

Whatever it was Legge had done, he was treated like an absolute pariah. He was removed to a bare room in the attics and his clothes were taken away. The rest of us moved in silence and fear.

Then he was brought down among us to the classroom. Fangby announced that his crime was so great that it could not be mentioned. It meant that he was to be beaten and expelled. A similar fate would befall us if we did the same thing.

Legge was deathly white. He was told to drop his pyjama trousers and bend down. Fangby then proceeded to thrash him with a cricket stump. He laid on twelve strokes, putting all his porpoise-like strength behind them. One of our number fainted, another ran out crying and was dragged back, another was sick all over the floor and was made to mop it up later. Then Legge was helped away. We never saw him again.

Before that incident, I had not minded Fangby. There was at times a sort of cringing friendliness about the man, as if he might be afraid of us, or at least had some sympathy for our predicament. Now we all hated him. He had utterly estranged himself from us.

It was clear that to become gentlemen we had to undergo the same sort of treatment as Dr Moreau dished out to the Beast People on his celebrated Island. Fear and force make gentlemen. It is the Law.

War shapes individuals and nations like no other experience. As my boyhood slipped away, Europe, with a terrifying inevitability, sank toward Hitler’s war. When I was thirteen, we started digging air raid shelters at school. But at the age of eighteen, I was drawn into the war against Japan, and despatched to the East: to India, the great whirlpool that sucked men into action in Burma.

Things get out of control in wartime and, in 1944, I found myself spending sixteen days on an Indian train. A detachment of eleven of us entrained at Mhow station. We crammed into a compartment with a little bone notice above the door: TO SEAT EIGHT INDIANS.

We were loaded down with kit and rations. We crammed in somehow, in the best of spirits as troops always are when on the move. Mhow station, beset by monkeys and banyan trees, smelt powerfully of cooking, frangipani, animal droppings, and hot steam engines. Soon the station fell back into the night.

We pulled the windows down to enjoy the warm breeze. We rolled our sleeves down. We applied acidic anti-mosquito cream to face and hands. All night we sat among our kitbags and rifles, talking and joking. In charge of us was a genial Yorkshireman, Ted Monks – fresh from England like the rest of us. He was a foreman bricklayer in Civvy Street.

Indian towns came flashing out of the night like Catherine wheels. A nostril full of pungency, a glimpse of eyeballs human and animal, and we would be tearing through, on, on, with the challenge of Burma somewhere at the end of the line. By dawn we fell asleep over our kitbags, huddled against one another or dozing on the luggage racks.

The Mhow quartermaster had issued us with rations for what was intended to be merely a five-day journey. No air transport in those days, you note. By the time we emptied a tin full of stale hard tack, we had a useful pail. In this pail – whenever the train stopped for inscrutable reasons of its own – we collected hot water from the engine with which to brew ourselves tea.

India was endless. The railway lines were endless. Sometimes the train pulled into a siding, where we waited in heat and silence for an hour or two for an express to thunder by.

Days passed. We ran out of food and money. The great lands, the bringers of famine and plenty, rolled past. Flat, achingly flat, always inhabited. Out on the glazed plains, frail carts moved, figures laboured. Always the bent back. No matter what befell elsewhere, those figures – men and women – were committed to their labours without remission. While I stared out of the window, talk in the compartment was of home, always of home, the work and fun, the buggers at the factory, the knee-tremblers after dark behind the pub, the years of unemployment and disillusion in the Welsh mines. All this was news to me at eighteen, and had almost the same impact as the landscape. I felt so ashamed of my middle-class background that never once in all my army years did I mention that I had been to public school.

Our detachment was at the mercy of the RTOs along the route. RTOs were Railways Transport Officers; they sat at various points along the system of routes the British had forged, like spiders in a big metal web. Occasionally, they would call us off the train; occasionally, we could wrest from them either fresh supplies or a meagre travel allowance.

The RTO at Allahabad, a great steel town, allowed us to sleep on the platform of his magnificent station. Next day at dawn, we were put on a milk train heading East. Every day, Burma – a word synonymous with death – drew nearer.

We visited Benares and, untutored as we were, had only contempt for the pilgrims washing in the filthy waters of the Ganges. Then the train was carrying us across the infinities of the Ganges plain. Again the labouring figures of people and animals, committed every day to struggle beneath the sun.

The line ran straight ahead until it faded into sizzling heat. Our train stopped unexpectedly at a wayside halt. On the platform stood a corporal, immaculate in his KD, rigidly to attention. The Indian passengers leaning from the window or hanging on the outside of the coaches took some interest in him. He was bellowing at the top of his voice.