Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ We crammed into a compartment with a little bone notice above the door: TO SEAT EIGHT INDIANS.

      We were loaded down with kit and rations. We crammed in somehow, in the best of spirits as troops always are when on the move. Mhow station, beset by monkeys and banyan trees, smelt powerfully of cooking, frangipani, animal droppings, and hot steam engines. Soon the station fell back into the night.

      We pulled the windows down to enjoy the warm breeze. We rolled our sleeves down. We applied acidic anti-mosquito cream to face and hands. All night we sat among our kitbags and rifles, talking and joking. In charge of us was a genial Yorkshireman, Ted Monks – fresh from England like the rest of us. He was a foreman bricklayer in Civvy Street.

      Indian towns came flashing out of the night like Catherine wheels. A nostril full of pungency, a glimpse of eyeballs human and animal, and we would be tearing through, on, on, with the challenge of Burma somewhere at the end of the line. By dawn we fell asleep over our kitbags, huddled against one another or dozing on the luggage racks.

      The Mhow quartermaster had issued us with rations for what was intended to be merely a five-day journey. No air transport in those days, you note. By the time we emptied a tin full of stale hard tack, we had a useful pail. In this pail – whenever the train stopped for inscrutable reasons of its own – we collected hot water from the engine with which to brew ourselves tea.

      India was endless. The railway lines were endless. Sometimes the train pulled into a siding, where we waited in heat and silence for an hour or two for an express to thunder by.

      Days passed. We ran out of food and money. The great lands, the bringers of famine and plenty, rolled past. Flat, achingly flat, always inhabited. Out on the glazed plains, frail carts moved, figures laboured. Always the bent back. No matter what befell elsewhere, those figures – men and women – were committed to their labours without remission. While I stared out of the window, talk in the compartment was of home, always of home, the work and fun, the buggers at the factory, the knee-tremblers after dark behind the pub, the years of unemployment and disillusion in the Welsh mines. All this was news to me at eighteen, and had almost the same impact as the landscape. I felt so ashamed of my middle-class background that never once in all my army years did I mention that I had been to public school.

      Our detachment was at the mercy of the RTOs along the route. RTOs were Railways Transport Officers; they sat at various points along the system of routes the British had forged, like spiders in a big metal web. Occasionally, they would call us off the train; occasionally, we could wrest from them either fresh supplies or a meagre travel allowance.

      The RTO at Allahabad, a great steel town, allowed us to sleep on the platform of his magnificent station. Next day at dawn, we were put on a milk train heading East. Every day, Burma – a word synonymous with death – drew nearer.

      We visited Benares and, untutored as we were, had only contempt for the pilgrims washing in the filthy waters of the Ganges. Then the train was carrying us across the infinities of the Ganges plain. Again the labouring figures of people and animals, committed every day to struggle beneath the sun.

      The line ran straight ahead until it faded into sizzling heat. Our train stopped unexpectedly at a wayside halt. On the platform stood a corporal, immaculate in his KD, rigidly to attention. The Indian passengers leaning from the window or hanging on the outside of the coaches took some interest in him. He was bellowing at the top of his voice.

      ‘Reinforcement detachment from Mhow heading for 36 British Division, disembark from train immediately. Bring your kit. At the double. Fall in.’

      ‘Christ, that’s us,’ said Ted Monks. ‘We’re not getting off here, are we? Where the hell’s this? This is nowhere.’

      We de-trained and fell in with our kit and our sack of bread and bully beef. We stood to attention. The train pulled away. It disappeared into the distance, down the straight line, across the great plain.

      Without explanations, we were ‘fell in’ outside the halt in a column of twos. On orders from the corporal, we began to march. A dusty track stretched away from the railway line at right angles to it. We progressed along it, sweating in silence.

      After an hour’s march, we reached a transit camp. It was arbitrarily established, and could just as well have been next to the railway line. There was no shade. We paraded in the sun to be addressed by a sergeant, who told us we were there to get properly washed and dhobied; we would be given a meal and would proceed with our journey in the morning. We were fell out.

      As Monks said, we had arrived at nowhere. Wild dogs and jackals ran through our bashas during the night (I was thrilled – something that did not happen at home). Kite hawks – the hated kite hawks – dived down and scooped food out of the mess tins of anyone unwary enough to cross an open space with his meal. Beyond the perimeters of the camp was flat desolation. The camp was the British world.

      One member of the camp staff was a man I recognized. He had been on the same troopship, the Otranto, which had brought our posting to India. I remembered him from among thousands of other troops aboard because he walked about in a distinctly civilian way (i.e. stoop-shouldered) singing a snatch of song over and over again.

      Take thou this rose,

      This little thing…

      There he was, bathed in Indian sunlight, clutching a piece of paper going about some negligible errand. I got close to him. He was singing to himself. It was the same song. I dubbed him the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah. When we got talking, I learnt that he prided himself on this snip of a posting he had secured, office orderly at the Transit Camp; it meant that he would not have to go to Burma. I was convinced that anywhere was better than that nowhere camp.

      A year or so later, it happened that I saw the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah again. He was alone in a crowd. To my delight, he was still singing the same unfinished lines of song to himself. War had no power to alter whatever was on the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah’s mind.

      We returned to our journey with a sack full of fresh provisions. The train was shunted into a siding at Jamalpore, where monkeys swarmed down, climbed throught the open windows of our carriage and stole two loaves of bread from our sack.

      Furious shouts. I jumped up and out of the window and on to the top of the train in no time. Six large rhesus monkeys regarded me with disapproval, before making off with their loot. I followed, jumping from carriage to carriage. The monkeys carrying the loaves began lagging behind. I had almost caught one when we came to some branches overhanging the line. The six of them leaped up and disappeared gibbering into the crown of a giant tree. We’d lost our bread.

      We were met at Sealdah Station when we arrived in Calcutta. A truck carried us to a transit camp buried somewhere in the greasy outskirts of the city. They say that Calcutta is a memorial to the unquenchable human spirit of survival. One’s first impression is that one has – as one was expecting to do all one’s life – arrived in Hell, that here is human desperation on a gigantic scale, and that the slums and hinterlands of the Infernal Regions are spreading until they encompass all India. A black water buffalo was calving on an iron bridge over a railway line. Her body lay on the pavement, her legs in the road. All the traffic, including our trucks, ran over her hooves. I looked down as we passed. A calf was emerging from among pulped flesh.

      Our camp lay under a railway embankment, surrounded by ferocious slums. Seven Dials in Henry Fielding’s time would have looked the same if you had put it under the grill. The tents which comprised the camp were survivors from the first world war. Everything was indescribably filthy, and flies buzzed everywhere.

      It was a refuge for СКАЧАТЬ