THE MINT. T. E. Lawrence / Lawrence of Arabia
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Название: THE MINT
Автор: T. E. Lawrence / Lawrence of Arabia
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788075836540
isbn:
'Saucy cunt,' grumbled Red-Head, scratching it: then he opened the door into a yard which gave light to the three great windows of a passage. Their panes were spotted with the scales of old frosting. 'Get these clean.' From a closet came leathers, dusters, a backless chair to stand on. The paint—spots were like isinglass, and had to be scraped off singly with a knife. Red-Head often passed, cheering our futility with horse-noises from his mouth.
In the passage behind my back stood a boxed telephone. Each time the bell rang its batman stepped to it. His callers were generally cronies. We heard snatches of Blackpool, of the Spurs' prospects, of Sunderland, or of winning horses in the older but little esteemed sport. Through the swing-doors came an officer's head, more often officers' voices. Sherry and bitters, gin and bitters, martinis, vergins, vermouths. 'Three whisky sodas quickly' - whose familiar harsh voice was that? My trade-test officer. The bartender splashed full his glasses and hurried to and fro. As he passed the telephone box he would reach a long arm, beer-laden, quickly into its depth. We had finished the windows: but our fatigue must last till nine.
'Come in here,' called Red-Head, through a full mouth, and we returned to the pantry. Its deal-topped table (on good legs of oak) was spread with grease-spotted sheets of the Star. The rout of the Greek Army jostled the dead Duchess of Albany in the headlines. The cook produced a much used plate of butter, an end of jam, and bread:- relics of the mess tea. 'Scran up.' We set to and wolfed. Two other batmen entered, with heaped plates of cold bacon and potato salad. Red-Head sluiced his share with vinegar. Noisily they shovelled the stuff away with the broad of their knives - a fine art. We watched it go. Three glasses of beer were brought, with an old pack of cards. They cut and the penalty was drinks. The telephone's servant joined the rest. Again they cut. 'Lost, fuck it' he grumbled and went out, to return beaming. 'Fucking bar's shut.' Laughter. Red-Head belched loudly, trying with one hand to still his kicking belly.
He was too full of food, and disgustedly banged his ravaged plate along the table at us, with a grunt. 'Muck in.' We did, yet still looked lean. 'You bloody swaddies can't half yaffle,' said he, enviously. 'Chuck 's that bread.' He hacked it thick, loaded the slabs with fat bacon, and rubbed them on the table where the vinegar had spilled. While we worked at this new luck they still talked of football, drinks and officers. 'Who's here tonight?' asked our taskmaster of the operator. 'Old man,' was the sufficient and meaning reply. The veriest recruit knew that 'old man' was the Commandant, the stark skull and crossbones under which the Depot sailed. 'The bastard!' swore Red-Head: he lifted the stock-pot's lid, and spat in neatly. 'A gob for his guts: soup's as rich as old nick.' He took his cap and went.
An hour later we slipped back to our hut and were heroes of the night, for we had the longest yarn and alone had made a meal out of our job. First Post came: last post. The plangent beauty of these night-calls putting duties behind us for eight hours and giving us the delight of a half-hour's bed before sleep:- a half-hour in which the relaxed body, free of its scratchy clothes and clumping boots, stretches itself between the smooth sheets, without censure. Then lights out - the nightly miracle which brought darkness, and silence with the pale moon to rule our boiling hut.
9. P.T.
Corporal Abner looked up suddenly, with that queer twist of the mouth which might be derision or might be pity, and said, 'You're for P.T. tomorrow: a quarter-past six.' The shades are closing inch by inch. It's this exercise I fear. My body is not worth much, now. The others put on a braver face. 'I'm glad we're going to get drill,' said Park: 'it'll take the slouch out of us.' 'Yes,' chimed in Madden, always quick to follow a lead, 'sort of thing the civvies in London pay fifty quid for, we get harry-freeman's.'
In a hollow dawn (there is early cocoa at the cook-house, but fellows on P.T. can't, in the quarter of an hour's dressing time, run so far and queue up for it) we fall in outside the hut. Our trousers are belted round us with knotted braces and their leg bottoms tucked into our socks. Rolled-up sleeves, of course, and rubber shoes. We are marched to the asphalt square whose smoothness is made skiddy, on such moist days, by its scattered grit. Across it the five hundred of us are spread in open order. Physical training is based on the assumption that the men are asleep or careless, or shirkers. It is an affair of suddennesses; starts and turns, cries, pitfalls and checks. Our fifty are as keen as wild mustard, but timorous for the first day. Many made mistakes and were bawled at till they grew rattled and became the easier victims. To a cool head, the instructors' over-careful precautions gave them away. We quickly learned to meet or avoid their onset. 'Bluff or scrounge,' was the old hands' proverb as they put us wise to labour-saving wrinkles, taking for granted that we were out to make the laziest of a tolerable job. Today, as it happens, we aren't: but tomorrow we shall be. Infection grows.
'Dismiss,' and we were panting on our beds for the ten minutes before breakfast. The fumes of sweat expanded broadly from our wet waistbands and clinging shirts. I missed breakfast because my breathing hurt me. After that Handley crash in Rome the X-ray showed one rib, furred like the bristles of a toothbrush, against the wall of my chest: and much lung-pumping taps its thin dagger-pain into my heart. When the trembling stopped I swallowed some water from the wash-house tap, and was better. We kicked our way into overalls, and paraded for fatigues.
The stick came down and cut off me and Park. 'Butcher's shop,' said Flight Sergeant Walker. Sounds as if my luck was out this morning. Distaste for the sight and feel and smell of raw flesh has made me almost a vegetarian. The butcher is a young corporal, face white and full as a bladder of lard, and his bloodied overalls smell of the trade. Thank heaven he does not want us in the shop. We are to fill and stoke the two boilers outside the door. In half an hour they are full of water, which is getting warm. He shows us by the ditch behind the shop, under a clipped thorn-hedge, heaps of the cut-open sacks in which his frozen carcasses had travelled. These we are to wash.
They must have been long lying there, for they were pressed solid, and stuck together. When we dragged at them they tore. Their insides were earwigged, maggoty and worm-full. Buck found a hedge-stake and prised the stinking layers apart over the grass: happy-looking grass, for it was rankly, greenly uncut and irregular, in the waste triangle behind the butchery.
We were to have treated each sack separately; but the damp ground had so conspired with the salt of the meat and the hedge-drippings against the cloth that it rotted away in our hands. Therefore with our stakes we forked lumps at a time into the coppers. The water boiled and we poled the sackings around under it till they were pliant. Then, fishing them out by sections, we impaled them on the quickset spikes where they steamed with an ardent soupy smell into the mist which was today's weather. The corporal came out rubbing his hands and sniffing our hedge which two hours' work had made mouldy with old jute. 'Good work,' said he, 'you can throw away the lot now.' 'Well I'm fucked,' gasped my half-section, at this futile issue of our toil.
'Posh job, Park,' said I, to tease him. Park, an embryo transport driver, with the swank of a failure calls himself an ex-Brooklands racing mechanic - to gild his degraded present by reflection. He has been at the least a garage-boy; and feels himself a tradesman and unionist. The tradesman has tremendous contempt for the class which knows no trade. So Park could not take refuge in my irony against misemployment as a labourer. Instead he stood up tally, and cursed the Depot and the job and the butcher-corporal and himself and the Army and Navy and Royal Air Force, while the smoke of our coppers vomited into the heavy air and rained down in a black swirl around our faces. 'Steady, Park, you'll curse the fire out.' 'Fuck the fire!' he cried, crashing СКАЧАТЬ