Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“It wasn’t a long march on, no more than about ten miles, but the state we were in then it might’ve been from Harwich to hell. And those as couldn’t keep up they pulled out of the line and hammered and left by the road—the very bit of road that man might’ve been building the day before.

“Now our last lot of guards, they’d been a bit soft—bastards still, but sloppy bastards, so we’d been getting away with little things. Then this new lot came, and they were hard bastards. They didn’t just crack down, fair and square—they set traps. Day before we were due our next move we were lining up for our ration—mostly it was just boiled rice, but some days there’d be scraps of meat in it, or dried fish—you wouldn’t’ve fed a dog on it, back home—and Terry spotted a bit of fish, as big as my thumb, maybe, lying by the pot, like it could’ve fallen out of the pot while they were mixing up. It didn’t look like any of the Japs was watching, so Terry scooped it up, but of course one of ’em had been keeping an eye on it while the others were looking the other way deliberate, so they were on him, and next morning they tied him to the pole and hammered him unconscious in front of us all. After that they kept us standing out in the sun while they got ready for the move.

“Now Terry was tough. He didn’t look it, mind you, a skinny fellow with a big head—big hands and feet too, like he hadn’t been put together right, somehow—but by the time the Japs were ready we could see how he was trying to stand up. And just before they gave the order to march Colonel Matson stood out of line, which he wasn’t supposed to, and said, ‘That man’s coming with us.’

“A couple of Japs ran to push him back into line with their butts, but he stood his ground and called out, ‘On your feet, Private Voss. Jump to it, man! Attention! Quick march!’

“And then Terry was up and starting to stagger over, and I yelled out the step for him. Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, and the lads joined in, and we hauled him across that way in little dribbles of steps while the guards stood and laughed until we dressed him in line.”

He paused in what was clearly a well-worn narrative, stirred his tea and drank.

“I don’t know why it is,” said Nell. “Heroism ought to be horrible. The need for it is usually horrible, and so is the event itself. So why is it that when one hears a story like that one feels a need to weep with a kind of joy?”

“It’s because we are the way we are,” said Uncle Albert. “Mind you, that’s just the half of it. We’d got about ten miles to go, and we’d got to get Terry there somehow, though ten miles was about as much as any of us could do, never mind helping a man along who couldn’t hardly walk a couple of steps on his own, and the Japs watching out for anyone slowing the line down, ready to haul him out and hammer him and leave him in the ditch. But most of the way they let us drag old Terry along, turn and turn about, one on each side with his arms round our shoulders. I thought maybe they’d eased off a bit because they’d been impressed with Terry’s guts, but it wasn’t that at all. They were just playing with us.

“All of a sudden, when we reckoned we’d just about done it, they pushed their way in among us and grabbed Terry and started to hammer him again. Of course we yelled at them and broke rank to try and stop them, but they’d got their guns on us before we’d hardly moved, and we could see they meant it. So we fell back, all except the Colonel. He just walked up to Terry regardless and bent down to pick him up.

“And then one of the Japs brought his butt crashing down on the back of his head and knocked him flat and half of them kept their guns on us while the others kicked and hammered the Colonel where he lay.

“Then they shoved us back into line and marched us on, broken men, broken men. Half of us wouldn’t have lasted the time we had, nothing like, without the Colonel, and we knew it. And that night, lying in our sheds, I could hear men sobbing in the dark.

“Only somewhere in the middle of the night the Colonel came crawling into the camp with Terry on his back. He’d tied his arms round his neck with his belt so he could drag him along. The Japs just flung them into the shed with the rest of us. And they had them both working on the road next day, but this time they let us cover for them a bit. More than a bit. I met a Jap one time—after the war this was—and I told him about this, and he said it was because they’d been impressed by an officer doing that for one of his men. I don’t know, myself. I could never figure the bastards out.”

He sat back and drank his tea again.

“Thank you,” said Nell. “Terry told me some of that, but of course it wasn’t from his own memory. It’s never the same as when someone has actually seen it happen. Now we must test the scones. I know the jam to be excellent.”

The reminiscence seemed to have exhausted Uncle Albert’s conversational energies, but he sat and munched and listened benignly while Nell talked about her own memories of her uncle. Gradually, as she did so, though her diction remained as precise as ever, the underlying oddity of some of her vowels became more noticeable, but at the same time less odd, once the connection had been made to the childhood of which she spoke.

She had been born in Whitechapel, just as the war was ending, into a family belonging to the Elect of God, one of those rigid, highly exclusive millenarian sects, the thought of which gave Jenny the shudders—far worse than the blanketing Anglicanism that her own grandparents had practised, and against which her mother had reacted with total impatience of anything to do with religion.

Nell’s family had been very poor. The sect’s principles forbade them the use of money that they hadn’t earned by their own labour, so they wouldn’t accept any kind of welfare payment or charitable help. If they had been permitted, they would have let their children die rather than use the National Health system. Their women were not allowed to work for wages. All this was justified by close reading of the Authorised Version.

They did, however, acknowledge a duty to look after their own. Nell’s father was a cobbler, but he died when she was five, leaving her mother with her and two younger brothers and no income at all. The sect, in their own phrase, “took pity on her,” that is to say she became a virtual domestic slave in the house of her in-laws, who, when there wasn’t work to keep her busy all day, loaned her to other members of the sect in the same capacity. Nell now thought that at least one of the men took advantage of this situation, but her mother had been too cowed to complain.

The mother had converted into the Elect, which was sometimes permitted when no suitable brides were available from within it. Nell believed she had married to escape from her own family, which was a branch of one of the criminal clans which then governed the underworld of the East End. Her father had been a professional hard man and frightener, notorious for his violence, and her only protector in her childhood and youth had been her older brother, Terry. When she was fifteen he was sent to prison for the first time, and offered a way out she took it, marrying illegally, and without the consent of her parents.

They made no effort to get her back. She was one fewer mouth to feed, and was never going to be handsome enough to earn worthwhile money on the streets. On her admittance to the sect she was “made new,” and nothing in her past was of any interest to them, so when Terry sought her out on leaving prison he was not welcomed. He was an ingratiating character, however, and managed to persuade the elders that his main interest was in their beliefs. Luckily for him they didn’t accept male converts, but had a category of “Tolerables,” who, if they remained faithful, would not be fully saved when the Lord destroyed sinful humanity, causing them to die of thirst by removing the sea (Revelation 21:1) but would be allowed to toil in a sort of underheaven, or celestial basement, doing such tasks as emptying the latrines, a necessary consequence of the full resurrection of the body.