A Soldier Erect: or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ calling down harshly to the brown faces below them. Wally Page and Dusty Miller distinguished themselves as usual. Some of my mates were being jipped before we ever touched land.

      For miles round, the sea was punctuated by the thirty vessels of our convoy. We had sailed from Southampton eight weeks ago, with a four-day break in Durban. The hellish Ironsides had become our home – so much so that I had developed one of the neuroses that home breeds: desperate till now to get off the hated boat with its hated routines of exercise and housey-housey, I was suddenly reluctant to leave the shelter of a familiar place.

      About India, there was nothing familiar. It took your breath away. It swarmed, rippled, stewed, with people. The docks were packed with coolies; as we moved in single lines down the gangplanks, loaded with rifles and gear and respirators and wearing full tropical kit complete with solar topees, we were surrounded by crowds of Indians. NCOs bellowed and struck at them as we formed up smartly into platoons, dripping sweat on to India’s soil.

      After an hour’s wait in the sun, we were marched off through the town to the station, with the regimental band going full blast.

      ‘Heyes front! Bags of bullshit! Show these bloody Wogs they’ve got the Mendips here!’

      It was impossible madness to keep eyes front! We were on an alien world and they didn’t want us to see! – it was another example of military insanity!

      Leading off the pompous Victorian centre of Bombay were endless warrens – narrow teeming streets packed with animals and amazing vehicles and humanity; though we were instructed not to think of it as humanity but just Wogs.

      If I had thought of India at all in more peaceful days, I had regarded it as a place where people were miserable and starved to death; but here was a life that England could never envisage, noisy, unregulated, full of colour and stink, with people in the main laughing and gesticulating in lively fashion.

      Knowing absolutely nothing of the culture, caring nothing for it, we saw it all as barbarous. Jungly music blared from many of the ramshackle little shops. Gujerati signs were everywhere. Tangled overhead cables festooned every street. Half-naked beggars paraded on every sidewalk. Over everything lay the heat.

      Although I do not remember the details of that dramatic march to the station, I recall clearly my general impression. The impact of noise, light, and smell was great, but took second place; following the long spell on the ship, we were on the look-out first and foremost for women. And there the women were, draped in saris, garments which struck us as not only ugly but form-concealing. Some women paraded with great baskets loaded with cow shit on their heads, walking along like queens, while others had jewels stuck in their noses or caste-marks painted on their foreheads. Barbaric! And set in scenes of barbaric disorder!

      People were washing and spitting at every street corner, and hump-backed cows were allowed to wander where they would, even into buildings!

      ‘It’s sort of a filthy place, is this,’ Geordie Wilkinson told me as we fell out at the station. He had the gift of grasping the obvious after everyone else.

      On the platform, we became submerged in this motley tide. In the chaos of boarding the train, porters struggled amongst us, grabbing at our kit-bags and luggage so that they could then claim exorbitant fees for their assistance. Their naked urgency, their struggle for work and life, were factors we had never faced before. And the disconcerting thing about the brown faces, when one was close enough to get a good eyeful, was that they looked very similar to English faces! It was the desperation, not the colour, that made them so foreign.

      This discovery haunted my days in India. In China or Africa, you are not so weighed down by the same reflection; people there have the goodness to demonstrate their foreignness in every fold of nostril, lip, and eye, whereas the Aryans of the sub-continent – why, that gnarled and emaciated porter trotting along in a small dhoti with your trunk on his head – he looks surprisingly like one of the clerks in father’s bank! That snaggle-toothed chap in the comic button-up white suit, arguing in what sounds like gibberish – put him in a proper pinstripe and he’d pass for an Eastbourne estate agent! That bald chap with the heavily pocked cheeks trying to flog you an over-ripe melon – wasn’t the corporal in PTC his very spitting image?

      I never entirely recovered from the shock of realizing that the English are just pallid and less frenetic Indians.

      Our task was at once to defend them from the Japanese and keep them down, so that their place in the British Empire remained secure.

      ‘If this is bloody India, roll on fucking Dartmoor!’ Old Bamber gasped, as we milled along the platform fighting the buggers off. Bamber was an old lag and did not care who knew it – a sour man whose days inside prison gave him a natural advantage in the hurly-burly of ‘A’ Company.

      ‘Grab us a seat, Stubby!’ my mate Wally Page called – like me, he operated a wireless set – as we fought to get into the wooden carriages, struggling against porters and other squaddies.

      ‘Keep a hold on your rifles!’ Charley Meadows was yelling. ‘Tread on their feet if they get too near for comfort!’ It was all right for the sergeant. He had been out here before in peacetime and knew the ropes.

      Neither Wally nor I managed to get a seat. Every little compartment was crowded with men and kit right up to the ceiling. It was better where we were, sitting on our kit in the corridor. We collapsed on our kit-bags, puffing and wiping our crimson faces. We sat there for an hour before the train moved out. For all that while, the porters and other beggars besieged us. The most alarming deformities were presented to our eyes: a child with both arms severed at the elbows, beggars ashake with alien palsies, men with blind sockets of gristle turned imploringly to Heaven, skeletal women with foetus-shaped babies at their breasts, scarecrows with mangled fly-specked limbs, deformed countenances, nightmare bodies – all aimed at us with a malign urgency.

      ‘Fuck off! Jao! Jao, you bastards, jao!’ we shouted. We had learnt our first and most important word of Urdu.

      ‘It’s like some fucking madhouse!’ Geordie said. ‘I mean, like, I’d no idea there were places like this here dump.’ He was jammed in the corridor with Wally Page and me. We did not realize then how rare corridors were in Indian trains. When Geordie brought out his cigarettes, a dozen brown hands uncurled through the window towards the packet. Geordie threw two fags out of the window and shouted to everyone to fuck off. Then we lit up. Geordie was a thin and awkward-looking bod until he played football – where he was often inside right to my right wing – on which occasions he took on a sort of terrible grace, his Adam’s apple pumping madly to keep ahead of him. At present you could almost hear his brain wrestling with the concept of India.

      Geordie was hatchet-faced, most of his teeth having been removed at the age of sixteen. Wally had a beefy face, a thick neck, and a body like a young bull. The bull-body was covered with yellow hair, less bovine than chick-like; it enclosed Wally from skull to instep as if he had been dipped quickly into scrambled egg. He was apt to punctuate his speech, when chatting to pals, with short jabs to the biceps, as if perpetually testing their amiability.

      ‘We’ve got a right lot here!’ Geordie exclaimed. ‘You would think they’d sort of get a bit organized. Why doesn’t bloody RSM clear this rabble off the fucking platform?’

      ‘He’s running up and down the train like an old tart.’ This observation was not entirely true, although certainly RSM Payne was marching from one end of the platform to the other, barking commands with an anxious air. ‘He doesn’t know whether his arsehole’s drilled, bored, or countersunk,’ Wally added.

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