Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

Duncan couldn't stand her. He got his food, saying nothing, and after a moment she moved on. But, 'My,' she murmured as she went, 'aren't we proud today?' And when he glanced her way again he saw her setting down her dinner on her table and touching her hand to her breast. 'My dears!' he heard her cry to her cronies. 'I've just been cut! Cut to the quick! Who? Why, Little Miss Tragedy Pearce over there…'

He put down his head, and took his plate across the hall in the other direction. He shared a table, near the gates, with Fraser and eight other men. Fraser was there already. He was talking animatedly to the man who had the seat across from him-a man called Watling, another Objector. Watling was sitting with folded arms, and Fraser was leaning forwards and tapping at the oilcloth cover on the table to make his point. He didn't notice Duncan come and draw out a chair, a few places away. The other men, however, looked up and nodded, pleasantly enough: 'Hello, Pearce.' 'All right, son?'

They were mostly older men. Duncan and Fraser were two of the youngest prisoners there. Duncan, in particular, was liked, and often looked out for… 'How are you?' the elderly man beside him asked him now. 'Had a visit lately, from your nice sister?'

'She came on Saturday,' said Duncan, as he sat.

'She's good to you. Nice-looking, too.' The man winked. 'And that never hurts, does it?'

Duncan smiled, but then started sniffing, screwing up his face. 'What's that awful smell?'

'What do you think?' said the man on his other side. 'That blasted recess has blocked again.'

A few yards away from their table was the sink where the men from the ground-floor cells on this side had to empty their chamber-pots. The sink was always getting blocked; Duncan glanced over at it now, incautiously, and saw it brimming over with a nauseating stew of urine and rigid brown turds.

'God!' he said, turning his chair. He started picking at his dinner. But that made him feel sick, too. The mutton was fatty, the potatoes grey; the unwashed, overboiled cabbage still had soil clinging to it.

The man sitting opposite saw him struggling, and smiled. 'Appetising, isn't it? Do you know, I found mouse-droppings in my cocoa last night.'

'Evans, from the Threes,' said someone else, 'says he once found toe-nails in his bread! Those buggers in C Hall do it on purpose. The worst thing was, Evans said, he was so bloody hungry he had to keep eating! He just picked the toenails out as he went along!'

The men made faces. Duncan 's elderly neighbour said, 'Well, it's like my old dad used to say: “Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings.” I tell you, I never knew the truth of that until they put me in here…'

They chatted on. Duncan scraped more dirt from his cabbage and loaded up his fork. As he ate, he caught snatches of Fraser's conversation with Watling, carrying over the other men's talk: 'But you don't mean to tell me, that with so many COs here and at Maidstone-?' The rest was lost. The table they were sitting at was one of fifteen, laid out on the concrete floor of their hall. Each table held ten or twelve men, so that the noise of conversation and laughter, the scrape of chairs, the shouts of the officers, was almost unbearable-and it was made much worse, of course, by the queer acoustics of the place, which turned any sort of cry into that of a platform announcer at King's Cross.

Now, for example, a sudden commotion made everyone flinch. Mr Garnish, the PO, had gone galloping down the hall and started screaming and swearing into some man's face- 'You little git!' -and all because the man had dropped a potato, or spilt his gravy, or something like that… The curses were like the dreadful bayings of a furious beast; but men turned to look, and at once turned back, as if bored. Fraser, Duncan noticed, didn't turn at all. He was still arguing with Watling. He gripped his cropped hair and said, laughing, 'We shall never agree!'

His voice carried clearly now; the hall had quietened down a little after Mr Garnish's outburst. The man on Watling's right-a man named Hammond; a deserter, in for robbery-looked at Fraser very sourly. 'Why don't you fucking well stop arguing, then,' he said, 'and give the rest of us a break? Gas, gas, gas, it's all you do. It's all right for you to talk, anyhow. It's your sort who'll do all right out of this war-just as you've done all right out of peace.'

'You're right,' answered Fraser, 'we will. Because my sort-as you call them-can rely on your sort thinking exactly that. While working men can see no good in peace-time, they'll have no reason not to go to war. Give them decent jobs and houses, give their children decent schools, and they'll soon get the point of pacifism.'

'For fuck's sake!' said Hammond in disgust; but despite himself, he was drawn into arguing. The man on the other side of him was drawn in, too. Someone else said Fraser seemed to think that the ordinary working man could do no wrong. 'You ought to try managing a factory load of them,' he said. He was in for embezzlement. 'That will soon change your politics, believe me.' Then Hammond said, 'And what about the Nazis? They're ordinary working men too, aren't they?'

'Indeed they are,' said Fraser.

'And what about the Japs?'

'Now, the Japs,' said the man next to Fraser-another deserter, called Giggs-'ain't human. Everybody knows that.'

The conversation ran on for several minutes. Duncan ate his filthy dinner, listening but saying nothing. From time to time he glanced at Fraser-who, having started the whole thing off, having stirred the table up, was leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, looking delighted. His uniform, Duncan thought, fitted him about as badly as everyone else's fitted them; the grey of the jacket, with its grubby red star, sucked the colour from his face; the collar of his shirt was black with dirt; and yet he managed, somehow, to look handsome-to look merely slender, say, where everyone else looked pinched and underfed. He'd been at Wormwood Scrubs three months, and only had another nine to do; but he'd already done a year at Brixton Prison, and Brixton was known to be harder than here. He'd once told Duncan, too, that even Brixton wasn't so much worse than his old public school… But only his hands had really suffered, from life in the Scrubs-for he was in the Basket Shop, and he hadn't yet got the knack of handling the tools. His fingers had blisters on them the size of shillings.

Now, turning his head, he caught Duncan watching him; and smiled. 'You don't join in our discussion, Pearce?' he called down the table. 'What's your opinion on all this?'

'Pearce hasn't got an opinion on anything,' said Hammond, before Duncan could answer. 'He just keeps his head down-don't you, cock?'

Duncan coloured, self-conscious. 'I don't see the point of going on about things all the time, if that's what you mean. We can't change anything. Why should we try? It's someone else's war, not ours.'

Hammond nodded. 'It's someone else's fucking war, all right!'

'Is it?' Fraser asked Duncan.

'It is,' said Duncan, when you're in here. Just like everything else is someone else's, too. Everything that counts, I mean: nice things, as well as bad-'

'Bloody hell,' said Giggs, yawning. 'You sound like a right old lag, son. You sound like a fucking lifer!'

'In other words,' said Fraser, 'you're doing just what they want you to do. Garnish, and Daniels, I mean-and Churchill, and all the rest of them. You're giving up your right to think! I don't blame you, Pearce. It's hard, in here, when there's no encouragement to do anything else. When they don't let you listen, even, to the news! As for this-' He reached down the table. There was a newspaper lying there, the Daily Express . But when he opened it up, it was like one of those Christmas snowflakes made by children at school: pieces of news had been clipped out of it, and virtually all that was left were the family pages, the sporting pages, and cartoons. Fraser threw it down again. 'That's what they'll do to your mind,' he said, 'if you let them. Don't let them, Pearce!'