Anthony Powell - The Valley of Bones

‘Former married quarters,’ said the gloomy C.3 lance-corporal guiding my group. ‘Condemned in 1914, don’t half wonder.’

I did not wonder either. 1914 was, in fact, the year when, as a child, I had last set eyes on these weary red cantonments, my father’s regiment stationed at a hutted camp between here and Stonehurst, the remote and haunted bungalow where my parents lived at that time. I remembered how the Battalion, polished and blancoed, in scarlet and spiked helmets, had marched into Aldershot for some ceremonial parade, drums beating, colours cased, down dusty summer roads. Afterwards, my father had complained of a sore heel caused by the rub of his Wellington boot, an abrasion scarcely cured before it was time to go to war. That war, too, had been no doubt the reason why these ramshackle married quarters had never been demolished and replaced. When peace came, there were other matters to think about. Here we were accommodated on the ground floor, a back and front room. Of the five others who were to share this billet, four — two from the Loyals, two from the Manchesters — were in their late twenties. They did their unpacking and went off to find the Mess. The remaining subaltern, from a Midland regiment, was much younger. He was short and square, with dark skin, grey eyes and very fair curly hair.

‘Those Lancashire lads in here with us are a dumb crowd,’ he remarked to me.

‘What makes you think so?’

‘Do you know they thought I talked so broad I must come from Burton-on-Trent,’ he said.

He spoke as if he had been mistaken for a Chinese or Ethiopian. There was something of Kedward about him; something, too, which I could not define, of my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell. He did not have a smudgy moustache like Kedward’s, and his personality was more forceful, more attractive too.

‘We’re going to be right cooped up in here,’ he said. ‘Would you be satisfied if I took over this area of floor space, and left you as far as the wall?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘My name is Stevens,’ he said, ‘Odo Stevens.’

I told him my own name. He spoke with a North Country or Midland intonation, not unlike that Quiggin used to assume in his earlier days, when, for social or literary reasons, he chose to emphasize his provincial origins and unvarnished, forthright nature. Indeed, I could see nothing inherently absurd in the mistake the ‘Lancashire lads’ had made in supposing Stevens a native of Burton-on-Trent. However, I laughed and agreed it was a ludicrous error. I was flattered that he considered me a person to take into his confidence on the subject; glad, too, that I was housed next to someone who appeared agreeable. In the army, the comparative assurance of your own unit, whatever its failings, is at once dissipated by changed circumstances, which threaten fresh conflicts and induce that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Brum, of course.’

‘Birmingham?’

‘What do you think,’ he said, as if it were almost insulting to suppose the matter in the smallest doubt. ‘Can’t you tell the way I say it? But I’ve managed to keep out of my home town for quite a while, thank God.’

‘Don’t you like it there?’

‘Finest city in the world,’ he said, laughing again, ‘but something livelier suits me. As a matter of fact, I was on the continent for the best part of six months before I joined the army.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Holland, Belgium. Even got as far afield as Austria.’

‘Doing what?’

‘There was an exchange of apprentices for learning languages. I pick up languages pretty easily for some reason. They were beginning to think I’d better come home and do some work just at the moment war broke out.’

‘What’s your job?’

‘Imitation jewellery.’

‘You sell it?’

‘My pa’s in a firm that makes it. Got me into it too. A business with a lot of foreign connexions. That’s how I fixed up getting abroad.’

‘Sounds all right.’

‘Not bad, as jobs go, but I don’t want to spend a lifetime at it. That’s why I wasn’t sorry to make a change. Shall we push along to the Mess?’

We sat next to each other at dinner that night. Stevens asked me what I did for a living.

‘You’re lucky to have a writing job,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried writing myself. Sometimes think I might take it up, even though peddling costume jewellery is a good trade for putting yourself over with the girls.’

‘What sort of writing?’

‘Spot of journalism in the local paper — “Spring comes to the Black Country” — “Sunset on Armistice Day” — that sort of thing. I knock it off easily, just as I can pick up languages.’

I saw Stevens would go far, if he did not get killed. He was aware of his own taste for self-applause and prepared to laugh at it. The journalistic streak was perhaps what recalled Chips Lovell, whom he did not resemble physically.

‘Did you volunteer for the Independent Companies?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t think I’d be much good at them.’

The Independent Companies — later called Commandos — were small guerilla units, copiously officered. They had been employed with some success in Norway. Raising them had skimmed off the best young officers from many battalions, so that they were not popular with some Commanding Officers for that reason.

‘I was in trouble with my CO the time they were recruiting them,’ said Stevens. ‘He bitched up my application. It was really because he thought me useful to him where I was. All the same, I’ll get away into something. My unit are a lot of louts. They’re not going to prevent me from having what fun the army has to offer.’

Here were dreams of military glory very different from Gwatkin’s. After all this talk, it was time to go to bed. The following morning there was drill on the square. We were squadded by a stagey cluster of glengarry-capped staff-sergeants left over from the Matabele campaign, with Harry Lauder accents and eyes like poached eggs. Amongst a couple of hundred students on the course, there was hope of an acquaintance, but no familiar face showed in the Mess the previous night. However, slow-marching across the asphalt I recognised Jimmy Brent in another squad moving at right-angles to our own, a tallish, fat, bespectacled figure forgotten since Peter Templer had brought him to see Stringham and myself when we were undergraduates. Brent looked much the same. I had not greatly liked him at the time. Nothing heard about him since caused me, in a general way, to want to see more of him. Here, however, any face from the past was welcome, especially so veteran a relic as Brent. After the parade was dismissed, I tackled him.

‘We met years ago, when you came over in Peter Templer’s second-hand Vauxhall, and he drove us all into the ditch.’

I told him my name. Brent clearly did not recognise me. There was little or no reason why he should. However, he remembered the circumstances of Templer’s car accident, and seemed pleased to find someone on the course who had known him in the outside world.

‘There were some girls in the car, weren’t there,’ he said, his face lighting up at that happy memory, ‘and Bob Duport too. I knew Peter took us to see a couple of friends he’d been at school with, but I wouldn’t be able to place them at this distance of time. So you were one of them? What a memory you’ve got. Well, it’s nice to find a pal in this god-forsaken spot.’

‘Do you ever see Peter now? I’d like to hear what’s happened to him.’

‘Peter’s all right,’ said Brent, speaking rather cautiously, ‘wise enough not to have mixed himself up with the army like you and me. Got some Government advisory job. Financial side. I think Sir Magnus Donners had a hand — Donners hasn’t got office yet, I’m surprised to see — Peter always did a spot of prudent sucking-up in that direction. Peter knows which side his bread is buttered. He’s been quite useful to Donners on more than one occasion.’