David Storey - Saville

The youths stood up; some were smoking, some remained standing by their benches, talking, glancing indifferently towards the open door.

A soldier with slightly longer hair and smoking a cigarette came from behind the wooden partition and read off names in a nasal voice.

Colin listened for his own. The last of the youths, with some prompting from the soldier, slowly drifted out. ‘J26, and quick about it,’ he called, echoing the words of the man behind the panel. He stood in the corridor outside, still calling, gesturing wildly and adding, ‘No, no, up the stairs, not down,’ coming finally into the room, allowing the door to crash to behind, and calling directly to the first of the soldiers who, Colin could now see, as he too came round the partition, was wearing sergeant’s stripes: ‘The bloody fools.’

He showed the sergeant the letter he’d been sent and was directed to one of the wooden benches. He waited for twenty minutes. Other youths drifted in, looking round, going to the glass panel, showing slips of paper, coming over to the benches, sitting down, yawning, one or two smoking. Two sooted windows looked out on an empty sky.

After a while, when the benches were full, the soldier with longer hair appeared once more from behind the partition. He read off a list of names and, but for Colin, the youths drifted out.

A third group came in, assembled on the benches, then, after a phone message received by the sergeant, were directed to the room upstairs.

The sergeant came out from the partition and, with the second soldier, sat down on the benches. He took out a cigarette, offered one to the soldier, and for a while stretched there, his head in his hands. The phone rang after a while and he got up, slowly, and went to answer it. His square, bullet-shaped head was visible beyond the glass panel, reddening, nodding up and down. Eventually he came back to the benches, replaced his cigarette in his mouth, and once again lay down.

‘What’re you doing here?’ the soldier with longer hair said, seeing Colin still waiting in the room.

He showed him the letter. His name was checked on a list.

‘You should have gone up three batches ago,’ the soldier said. He showed the list to the sergeant.

‘I was told to wait in here,’ he said.

‘Who told you to wait in here?’ the sergeant said.

‘You did,’ he said.

‘You couldn’t have listened. Half the people that come in here are deaf,’ he added to the soldier. ‘Up to J26. That’s what I said. You better get up now.’

He went out to the corridor. A burst of laughter came from the room behind, cut short a moment later by the ringing of the phone.

He climbed up the steps to the third floor, and walked slowly along the concrete corridor looking at the numerous identically painted doors. Finally he came to a room lettered J29, the six apparently having spun upside down. He knocked on the door loudly, heard no answer from the other side, and pushed it open.

Rows of small wooden desks and chairs were set out inside. At a larger desk, facing the rows, sat a soldier with two stripes on his arm. He was unwrapping a packet of sandwiches, which were held together by a rubber band. As Colin entered he looked up in surprise.

‘What is it?’ he said. A large thermos flask stood on the desk beside him.

‘I’ve been sent up’, he said, ‘from the room below.’

‘There must be some mistake. I’ve just had the last batch through,’ he said.

He showed him the letter with his name and number and the time of his appointment.

‘I was just going to have my lunch,’ the soldier said. He began to replace the rubber band around his sandwiches. ‘How many more are there?’ he added.

‘Just me,’ he said.

‘Just one, is it?’ He leant down by the desk, picked up a briefcase and put the sandwiches then the thermos inside and fastened the top. He replaced the case beside the desk. ‘I can’t see why you couldn’t have waited. I was just going to have my lunch,’ he said again.

He handed Colin a printed card.

‘Don’t look at it’, he said, ‘until I tell you,’ pointing at the desks and adding, ‘I should just sit farther back. Not near the front. Have you got a pencil? You’ll find one on the desk.’

He chose one of the desks, finally, in the centre of the room, looking up to see if the soldier had any objection, saw that he’d returned once more to his brief-case, stooping down, and sitting at the desk set the card down on the top before him.

‘Are you ready?’ the soldier said. He’d produced a watch from his brief-case and gazed across at him with it held significantly in his hand. ‘When I tell you to go you’ve got ten minutes to answer the questions on the card before you. I can’t answer any inquiries: if you can’t understand them just leave a blank.’

He pressed the watch down with a significant gesture and nodded his head.

‘That means’, he added, calling across in irritation, ‘you may begin.’

Colin picked up the pencil on the desk before him, saw that the first question involved a juxtaposition of figures and numbers in sequence, not unlike those he had answered years before in his grammar-school examination, and, deciding it would take a little thought to work it out, moved on to the second. He answered the second question, then the third, writing the brief answers down in a box at the side. When he’d reached the final question at the foot of the card he found that he had still one box empty.

Looking back up the column of answers he saw, as he reached the top, that inadvertently he’d placed the answer to the second question in the box provided for the answer to the first. Similarly the answer to the third question was in the box provided for the answer to the second, the answers, in effect, to all the thirty-two questions, with the sole exception of the first, which had no answer at all, being in boxes once removed from their proper place.

He had just begun, laboriously, to draw an arrow in the margin to indicate the error, when the corporal at the desk called out, ‘Pencils down. No looking at the card or reading it from now on.’

‘I was putting in a correction to the placing of the answers,’ he began to say when the corporal called, ‘No comments, please. If you wish to make inquiries you may raise your hand.’

He lifted his hand. The corporal appeared to take no notice of it for several seconds, his attention on a red pencil which he was sharpening with a knife.

‘Yes, what is it?’ he said, finally looking up.

‘I was about to point out an error I’ve made in the positioning of the answers,’ he said.

‘No comment may be made upon the examination. Please bring it out.’

He got up from the desk and took the card down to the soldier.

‘You’ve left the pencil behind, I take it?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘If you don’t watch them the whole roomful can go inside a morning. Please go up to room S27 on the floor above.’

‘I thought I’d just like to point out’, he said, indicating the card over which the red pencil was now sharply poised, ‘that the positioning of the answers isn’t correct. That the answer in effect to number one…’

The soldier turned slowly to look at his face.

‘Why don’t you piss off?’ he said.

When he glanced back from the door he could see the soldier placing a neat column of red crosses down the side of the card, checking the answers automatically with a sheet before him, marking a further cross and looking up at him in some surprise before he finally stepped out into the corridor beyond.

S27 was a large room, somewhere near the top of the building. In the centre of it were two or three elderly men in white coats standing by a metal stove. Its metal chimney went up through a large, ill-fashioned hole in the ceiling.