Anthony Burgess: Tremor of Intent

'You mean they have atavistic tendencies?'

He didn't know what the hell he meant. He knew nothing now except the trilogy of sciences he was studying for the Higher School Certificate. He was becoming both full and empty at the same time. He was turning into a thing, growing out of boyhood into thinghood, not manhood – a highly efficient artefact crammed with non-human knowledge.

'And,' I asked, 'what will you do when war breaks out? Just say that it's all a matter of ignorance and the poor sods can't help it? Because they'll be coming for us, you know. Poison gas and all.'

He suddenly seemed to realise that the war was going to touch him as well as other people. 'Oh,' he said, 'I hadn't thought about that. That's going to be a bit of a nuisance, isn't it? There's this question of my state scholarship, you see.' There was no doubt that he was going to get one of those; his examination results were going to be brilliant.

'Well,' I said, 'think about it. Think about the Jews. Einstein and Freud and so on. The Nazis regard science as a kind of international Jewish conspiracy.'

'They have some of the finest scientists in the world,' said Roper.

'Had,' I said. 'They're getting rid of most of them now. That's why they can't win. But it'll take a long time to persuade them they can't win.'

That was a lovely summer. Roper and I, with ten pounds each in our wallets, hitch-hiked through Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France. We had a month of bread and cheese and cheap wine, of the 'J'aime Berlin' pun about Chamberlain the umbrella man, of war talk under brilliant sun. We spent one night in our sleeping-bags near the teeth of the Maginot Line, feeling well protected. We were back in England three days before war broke out. Our examination results had come through in our absence in soon-to-be-locked-up Europe. I'd done well; Roper had done magnificently. There was some talk of my going to the School of Slavonic Studies in London; Roper had to wait for news of his scholarship. We were both drawn, during the interim time, to the only community we knew; we went back to school.

Father Byrne was now very good as Suffering Ireland. He came from Cork and hinted that his sister had been raped by the Black and Tans during the Troubles. 'Warmongering England,' he cried in morning assembly. Antichrist Germany never came into it. 'She has done it again, declaring war, backed by the Jews with their wads of greasy notes.' A brief impersonation of International Finance. 'This war, boys, is going to be a terrible thing. Europe will soon be swarming, if not swarming already, with ravaging and pillaging soldiery. It will be Ireland all over again, the leering and tramping louts, not a thought in their heads but this damnable sex, an abomination before Almighty God and His Blessed Mother.' Soon Roger Casement was brought in. And then he gave us the news that all scholarships were temporarily suspended. I said to Roper, after a morning of yawning lounging in the school library, 'Let's go out and get drunk.'

'Drunk? Can we?'

'_I__ certainly can. As for _may__, who's to stop us?'

Bitter beer was fivepence a pint in the public bars. We drank in the Clarendon, the George, the Cuddy, the King's Head, the Admiral Vernon. Bradcaster smelt of khaki and diesel-fuel. There was also a sort of headiness of promise of the night – this damnable sex. Did not the girls in the streets seem to flaunt more, more luscious-lipped, bigger-breasted? It wTas always unwise ever to think Father Byrne totally wrong about anything. Over my sixth pint I saw myself in uniform of a subaltern of the 1914-18 War, girls panting as they smelt the enemy blood coming off me as I passed the ticket-barrier at Victoria Station, London, home for a spot of leave. Hell in those trenches, girls. Tell us more. I said now to Roper: 'Going to volunteer. This dear country we all love so much.'

'Why?' swayed Roper. 'Why so much? What has it done for you or for me?'

'Freedom,' I said. 'It can't be so bad a bloody country if it lets buggers like Father Byrne attack it in morning assembly. You think about that. What are you going to choose – England or bloody Father Byrne?'

'And,' said Roper, 'I thought I'd be going to Oxford.'

'Well, you're not. Not yet you're not. They're going to have us both sooner or later. Best make it sooner. We're going to volunteer.'

But before we could go and do that, Roper was sick. He had no true hearty English beer-stomach. He was sick in a back-alley near the Admiral Vernon, and this rationalist moaned and groaned prayers like 'Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph' as he tried to get it all up. The scientific approach to life is not really appropriate to states of visceral anguish. I told Roper this while he was suffering, but he did not listen. He prayed however: 'Oh God God God. Oh suffering heart of Christ.' But the next day, very pale, he was prepared to go with me to a dirty little shop that had been turned into a recruiting centre. The cold deflation of crapula perhaps made him see himself as temporarily empty of a future; the only thing he could be filled with in these times was his generalised young man's destiny. And, of course, that went for me too.

'What will our parents say?' wondered Roper. 'We should really write and tell them what we're doing.'

'Reconcile yourself to the jettisoning of another responsibility,' I said, or words to that effect. 'We'll send them telegrams.' And off we went to see a sergeant with a dreadful cold. I put in for the Royal Corps of Signals. Roper couldn't make up his mind. He said: 'I don't want to kill.'

'You dod't have to,' said the sergeant. 'There's always the Bedics.' He meant the Medics. The Royal Army Medical Corps. RAMC. Rob all my comrades. Run Albert matron's coming. Roper bravely joined that mob.

It seems strange, looking back, that the British armed forces had as yet no room for genuine skills, except of the most elementary trigger-squeezing, button-pressing kind. All the time Roper was in the army, nobody ever once thought that here was a brain that could be utilised in the development of the most horrible offensive weapons. For that matter, my own ability to speak French and Russian quite well, and Polish moderately well, was seized on with no eagerness. I even had difficulty in transferring to the Intelligence Corps when it was formed in July, 1940. My officers spoke French with a public school accent; the British have always been suspicious of linguistic ability, associating it with spies, impresarios, waiters, and Jewish refugees: the polyglot can never be a gentleman. It was not until the Soviet Union became one of our allies that I was allowed to bring my Russian into the open, and then there was long delay before it was used. It was used when there was some sort of programme of Anglo-American aid to Russia; I was brought in as a junior assistant interpreter. This sounds big enough stuff for one still so young, but it was only to do with the provision of sports equipment for the ratings of Soviet naval vessels. There was a bigger job that at one time I thought I might get, something to do with the putting of a bay leaf in every tin of American-aid chopped pork, the Russians finding pig-meat so un-garnished unpalatable, myself to explain that this would slow up deliveries, each bay leaf having to be dropped in separately by hand, but I never got the job. And now back to Roper.

He wrote to me first of all from Aldershot, saying that a bomb had dropped near Boy ce Barracks and he'd been thinking more than usual about death. Or rather what Catholics call the Four Last Things Ever To Be Remembered: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. He'd succeeded, he said, in blotting those doctrines out pretty well when he'd been in the Science Sixth, but what he wanted to know was this: did these things perhaps exist – the after-death things, that was – for somebody who believed in them? He'd been pût in rather a false position, he thought, from the point of view of religion. When he'd arrived at the Depot as a recruit, they'd called out: 'RCs this side, Protestants that, fancy buggers in the middle.' His intention had been to declare himself an agnostic, but that would have put him right away among the United Board. So he said he was an RC – 'on the surface, the army being all surface'. When he became a sergeant he found himself possessed not merely of authority but of Catholic authority. There was this business of helping to march the men to Mass on Sunday mornings. And the priest in the town church was decent, friendly, English not Irish, and he asked Roper to use his influence to make more of the men go to communion. But, after this bomb had dropped near Boyce Barracks, which was very early in his army career, he'd been made aware of the talismanic power of having 'RC in his paybook. 'You're an RC,' some of his barrack-room-mates had said. 'Going to stick close to you we are next time one of those bastards drops.' What Roper said in his letter was: 'There seems to be a certain superstitious conviction among the men that the Catholics have more chance of "being all right" when death threatens. It's as though there's a hangover of guilt from the Reformation among the common people – "We didn't want to get away from the Old Religion really, see. We was quite happy as we was. It was them upper-class bastards, Henry VIII and whatnot, that made us break away, see." '