Doris Lessing - The Grandmothers

There’s a bloody war on.

Several hundreds of young men kept together by the uniform and the merest framework of discipline, the prescribed measures of saluting, the Yes Sirs, the No Sirs, the drills, and meanwhile months no, years, now - of the upper ranks and the Other Ranks too made equal (almost) by a hundred non-military occasions, the concert parties, the theatre shows, the lectures: surely this must have frayed the fabric of discipline into ineffectiveness? Not so. First, the rumour: We’re being sent north-east to fight the bloody Japs. At once it was as if the whole camp snapped to attention. Then, the hard fact. It was true. Camp X fizzed with elation, they might be going off to a festival, not certain danger and possible death. At last, they would justify themselves, the whole bloody lunacy of their being here at all would make sense. James, too, as excited as the rest, but then, brought down: his name was not on the lists: he was not going.

He sat in Administration behind his desk, all other desks but one deserted. At each desk a typewriter, folders, loose papers stirring in sluggish air from a dozen ceiling fans that chug-chugged like motors, and James’s mouth was a hard ugly line and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. Captain Hargreaves was here to calm and to defuse, because it was in Administration that faces like James’s were to be expected.

Second Lieutenant Reid and Captain Hargreaves were on Jimmy and Tommy terms except for sometimes, like now.

‘Tommy,’ began James, still sitting, but saw his superior officer’s monitoring frown and he stood up. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it isn’t fair.’

Captain Hargreaves merely smiled, but James persisted. ‘It simply isn’t fair, it isn’t good enough - sir.’

Why me? could have come next, but shame suppressed it.

‘Someone has to stay and keep things going, you know that, Second Lieutenant. We can’t just march off and leave the place empty.’

James was quivering with the arbitrary injustice of it all.

His senior officer went on, ‘There will be ten of us left in Administration, and some for Other Duties.’

James remained at attention.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ offered the captain but went red because of the bathos. He stood up.

‘Are you going with the rest, sir?’

‘Yes. As it happens. I am.’ And he escaped.

Later, walking across to the Officers’ Mess, James encountered Major Briggs, who saw from the young man’s state that he must stop, so he stopped.

James saluted.

‘] know what you are going to say, Lieutenant. But someone has to stay. And you are good at it. You can blame yourself if you like.’

This joke fell well short of its target. James knew he was good at it. Pen-pushing and Admin; that’s what he was good at.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait … but you won’t be doing much of” that. You’ll be working pretty hard, I’d say.’

‘But perhaps they don’t serve so much, sir?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ And the major put an end to this miserable conversation, because he knew how he’d feel, left behind in Camp James saluted. He saluted. That was that.

Off went the division, in long trains and many lorries. Camp X was nearly empty. Those left behind to hold the fort drank bitterly in the various messes, and talked bitterly about their luck.

James sat alone in Admin, with all the fans going and dust swirling about outside.

‘Darling. My darling Daphne. If you only knew how I rely on you. If I didn’t have you to think of now, with what has happened to me, then …’ And he described his situation. ‘And so I’m stuck here and the division has gone off, and my regiment. I often wonder, what was the point, all that time training in England, and then I missed the first Normandy invasion and Dunkirk, and we weren’t sent to Africa, and I might just as well have faked an excuse, my knee would have done, or gone down the coal mines. I sometimes think that would have been better. But then I wouldn’t have met you and that is what matters, the only thing that matters.’ And he repeated the refrain of his love for a page or two. Then, as always, he told her what he had been reading. ‘I found a lovely poem. Of course you must know it. It is called “Deirdre”. By James Stephens? It makes me think of you. “But there has been again no woman born/Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful/Of all the women born.” Deirdre and Daphne. And you are a queen. My Queen Daphne.’ And so he raved on for a page, then another, until it was time to go to the Officers’ Mess for dinner and the News.

Their regiment was in the thick of it, up in Manipur and Kohima. There had been casualties.

Weeks passed and back came the soldiers, not elated now, all that had left them, but they had been through it and looking at each other’s faces could see how they had all changed.

Jack Reeves was wounded and in hospital. Again James lost his friend. Sergeant Perkins would be decorated for conspicuous gallantry. A few killed. ‘Reasonable casualties for what was achieved; we threw the Japs out of India.’

But it did look as if the war was coming to a close, in Europe, at least. There would be an end. Soon. In Northern Europe it is when spring is on the horizon in the shape of longer days and earlier dawns that people subside into depression or think of suicide. Similarly now, with peace actually coming nearer every day, Camp X seethed and boiled with discontent. ‘So near and yet so far’ was the title of a poem in the camp newsletter. With the refrain, ‘So near to them, so far to us’ - them being the senior officers, who so often were to be observed taking off in Dakotas for Home. Officers and VIPs.

Donald put on Romeo and Juliet, and James was Romeo, a male part at last, astonishing everyone, and added several letters to his pile of them to Daphne, which he would post when censorship was over.

He also gave a lecture on Modern Poetry, while Donald sat proudly listening, for he was remembering how much James was his creation. And James said so: ‘I owe you a good deal,’ be said, ‘don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.’

‘Oh, jolly good show,’ said Donald.

The end of the war in Europe, so now they could go home -but when? Oh, no, not now, don’t think it, the ships will be full for a long time yet, you must take your turn, it’s not only you, but the RAH boys from all the far-flung parts of Empire, so many impatient young men, not enough ships, wait, wait, you’ve stuck it out for nearly four years, haven’t you? Just be patient a bit longer.

Not all could, or did. In two other camps, where they had been told they would be kept here, in India, to ‘maintain order’ to ‘contain unrest’ to ‘combat sedition’ to ‘preserve the British Empire’, disaffection broke out. ‘We didn’t join up to do the dirty work of the British Empire. “We joined up to fight Hitler. “You were called up and you will do as you are told.’

Speeches, real riots, and the camps were a-boil.

A couple of soldiers, ‘hot heads’, ‘incendiaries’, were court-martialled, but the Authority had listened, had taken heed. In Parliament at Home, questions were asked and speeches being made. And so the soldiers were going home.

Some, who remembered the bad time they had bad on the ship coming to India did not look forward to the sea voyage home. But this time it would not be around the Cape, the long, long journey, but through the Suez Canal.

But James had dreamed of making landfall at the Cape (though luck might just as well have taken him to Durban), and finding Daphne and his son and … there his thoughts became hazy. Yes, of course she had a husband, but she loved him, James, and there was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? The main thing, what he had to hold on to, was his child. His son - there could be no doubt about it, a love child, there could never have been more of a child of love than his and Daphne’s. Jimmy Reid, now four years old.