Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

All through the Confession, the Te Deum and the Creed, George was wishing that he’d worn his uniform. On the far side of the aisle, Colin Mansell, a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command, was stealing all the thunder reserved for our boys on their home leaves. Girls who wouldn’t spare a second glance for George were favouring Mansell with shy stares. His boiled face still lumpy with acne, Mansell wore the pious smirk of the returning hero, squared his shoulders and joined in the singing of “Now Thank We All Our God” in a voice designed to carry to the most distant of his admirers.

Then the Rector was up in the pulpit, framed by the blue banner of the Women’s Institute, and George listened to him speaking with the odd feeling that this Sunday’s text had been chosen as a private code between father and son. It was — wasn’t it — the Navy that his father was talking about? When the Rector said “vocation”, George knew exactly what he meant — it was the North Atlantic, the nightwatch, the line of pencilled positions marching across the empty chart.

“Today,” his father said, his voice booming in the rafters, “that word vocation has a special meaning for us as we approach the end of yet another year of war, and come to terms once again this Advent with the unfamiliar callings of war. Many of us in this parish have loved ones fighting — some held as prisoners — in foreign lands; men, and women too, who are indeed walking worthy in ways that those of us who are left at home may find it hard to accept or comprehend …”

Was that what he had really meant when he had peered disdainfully at the Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables? And was he now using the pulpit to say all the fatherlike things that he somehow couldn’t say over the dining table? Hopefully, uncertainly, George searched his father’s face, willing his father to meet his own gaze. But the Rector refused to be drawn: he went on addressing the flaky duck-egg paint on the church ceiling, telling it old, over-rehearsed home truths about duty, honour, love and labour (which the Rector called “getting one’s nose down to the grindstone”). George had lost him. He was like the big trout that always got away the moment you thought you had him hooked.

In the pew in front, Vivienne Beale was leaning forward, her woollen coat stretched excitingly tight around the slender stalk of her back. George worked out exactly where the elastic yoke of her bra-straps was hidden under the wool. He thought he detected a tiny lump, just to the left of her spine, where the fiddly hooks and eyes joined up. After last year’s Harvest Supper & Dance, she’d let George slide his hand inside her blouse, but she’d wriggled away when his fingers found a wired and bolstered nipple. At Pwllheli, he’d got as far as Number 4 with a girl called Judith Pugh. Received wisdom had it that once you’d made 5, you were as good as home to 10; and Judith Pugh had the reputation of being a real goer. George reckoned that he stood a damned good chance of not being a virgin by the time he came back for his next leave. Everything would look different then.

“In Saint Paul’s words, we must forbear one another in love …” The Rector was beginning to wind down now. George, moving with extreme caution, crossed his legs to hide his hard-on.

“And now, to-Gahd-the-Father-Gahd-the-Son-and-Gahd-the-Holyghost …” His father, like a fat bride in his surplice, swung to face the altar as the congregation came to their feet and George rose, crippled; his knees bent, chest thrust forward, clasped hands shielding his delinquent pelvic section. “Beallhonourandglory, nowandevershallbe, worldwithoutendamen-hymnnumber …” By the time the organ started up on “Jerusalem My Happy Home”, George was able to stand upright.

His father drove him to the station in the car that his mother called Horace the Morris. On the windy platform, his father said, “Well … best of luck with the exam, then. Do hope you make the, ah, Navigation course.” George was surprised, and pleased too, that he’d remembered. When the train came in, though, they shook hands like strangers. “Try and remember to write to your mother, will you? It means a lot to her.” Did that mean it meant a lot to him as well, or did it mean that it was the sort of boring thing that was only of interest to women? George couldn’t tell.

The slow train to Crewe was unheated. To start with he had the compartment to himself, where he sat huddled by the window in his stiff blue greatcoat. He tried and failed to read the Lilliput that he’d bought at Wyman’s. He stared out of the window, fogging the glass, and watched the rolls of thick steam from the engine blot out the sodden countryside. There was steam in the compartment, too; cold, acrid, bowel-smelling. He made a list of all the things that he might have said to his parents but hadn’t. He saw himself as the life and soul of the Rectory; his father beaming with pride, his mother full of earnest questions. Then he thought that he would probably be killed at sea. He imagined Mrs Norris from the post office bringing the telegram up the Rectory drive on her bicycle. There’d be a memorial service at the church, and Vivienne Beale would be there, dressed in black lace (including suspenders), head bowed, weeping quietly behind her veil.

“We never knew how brave he was,” his father said.

“I did,” said Vivienne Beale quietly. Then she whispered — she had told no-one this, not even her own mother—“I am carrying his child.”

At Didcot, a man got into George’s compartment. He was, George thought, rather too well dressed to be travelling in Third. He settled himself on the seat opposite, looked across at George and said, “Going back to your ship?”

On one side of the compartment, below the sagging hammock of the luggage rack, was a gouache of Weymouth seafront before the war; on the other was a cartoon of a bullet-headed German snooper with the caption, “Remember — WALLS HAVE EARS”.

In his best officer-of-the-watch voice, George said: “Shouldn’t you know better than to ask a damnfool question like that?” It sounded good, said out loud; a pretty stiff reproof.

The man, who was old, forty at least, said, “Sorry I spoke,” and laughed. “You don’t mind if I light my pipe, do you?”

George stared pointedly at Oxfordshire and said, “Not in the least,” in a way that made it plain as daylight that he minded very much indeed. The man shrugged, smiled, lit up and read — or rather pretended to read — a book with a yellow cover. He looked a thoroughly slimy type. As the train pulled out of Stafford station he went off to the bog at the end of the carriage and George was able to take a close look at the chap’s reading matter. It was called The State in Theory and Practice , and it was published by the Left Book Club. The man was obviously a bolshie — a bloody fifth columnist for Uncle Joe.

Trundling up England alone with a spy, George felt humbled by the thought of his own heroic and secret destiny. Eyeing his reflection in the darkening train window, he was torn between pity and admiration for himself. He was going to sea. He was going to take command of men. And putting yourself in the path of trackless torpedos was no Sunday School picnic. If the torp had your name on it … His eyes stung from the smoke from the bolshevik’s pipe.

When Rowley was killed in France in 1940, it had been a thrilling event. The Head talked of Rowley’s Supreme Sacrifice and of how he had Laid Down His Life For etcetera. The school had been granted a special Free Half to mark the shell that had blown Rowley to bits at Gravelines. George, in the Lower Fifth then, had felt a connection with Rowley so close that it was the next best thing to seeing your own name go up on the painted Ave atque Vale board in chapel. He’d been Rowley’s fag. Indeed Rowley, an amiable and rather lazy house monitor, had given George his old brass fly box at the end of his last term, and George still fished with Rowley’s black gnats and Rowley’s Tup’s Indispensables. The day that Rowley was killed was a day of almost unbearable personal glory for George Grey. That night he wept over Rowley’s death and was proud of his tears, those outward and visible signs of a very proper manly grief within. Eight more Old Vigornians had been killed in action since then, but none of their deaths had been a patch on Rowley’s.