At the Break of Day (22 page)

The next day he was told to shin up, then jump from gym ropes he could hardly clasp by a sweating instructor who moved the mat as he jumped and laughed as the rope burned his hand and then the mat burned his shins. He laughed as his elbow, then his shoulder crashed on to the hard polished floor.

‘Think you know more than the Army, do you?’ the instructor ground out. ‘Think you can cheek a Sergeant, do you? We’ll see about that.’

He was put on fatigues because he was last out of the changing rooms when the instructor hid his boots, slapping his rubber slipper in his hand as he laughed, whipping it across Jack’s back. But he wouldn’t show the pain, or the anger.

The next day he drilled with raw feet, threw his rifle against his bruised shoulder and held the butt in a hand that throbbed and bled but he showed nothing. There was no smoke break for him and he winked at Sid and Nigel as he marched, looking at the sky, the clouds, thinking of Lee, of Rosie.

He scrubbed the walls in the cookhouse all evening and watched the cockroaches scuttling out from behind the pipes. But none of this mattered. He was tough, he could take it. He was alive. He was nineteen. Rosie loved him. Lee was all right. Maisie and Ollie were all right. Rosie had written and said so.

The next week the Corporal found a speck of dirt on the back of Jack’s buckle and grinned as he extended his punishment. He spent the evening syphoning petrol then rubbing graffiti off the lavatory walls with it, tasting it, smelling it. He vomited all night in the latrines.

But he could take it, he told Sid and Nigel who came and stood by him. It was Sam’s bloody handwriting.

‘How exquisite,’ Nigel said.

They laughed, all of them, even Sam, who polished Jack’s boots for him that night, and bought him a beer, while Sid stayed behind and laid out his kit. Nigel bought him another and because he was such a tight arse Jack wondered why.

‘You’re keeping that bastard off our backs. We’re extraordinarily grateful, you know.’

He didn’t understand why Jack laughed, why he laughed even when he lay on the floor beside his bed, and neither did Jack himself, especially in the dead of night when the laughter choked into silent tears and he churned between images of the sisters and Lee and Rosie.

He peeled potatoes when the Corporal decided his locker was a disgrace, though there was nothing wrong with it. He watched the squad run to PE in baggy shorts and singlets, carrying their plimsolls, wearing their boots, their pale hairy legs thickening already from the drill. He thought of Butlins, of Harold, and cut into the potato once more. Rosie had written, she still loved him. Lee was happy. Maisie and Ollie were fine. And he was fine. He was nineteen. He could take it.

Sid shared his food parcels with Nigel and Jack. They were all fitter by the fourth week. The Corporal still shouted, still punished, but Jack hadn’t broken. The men were his friends, they cheered as he cut the grass, yet again. They helped him off with his pack after he had been doubled round the square, yet again.

They woke him when he slept too soundly during the education talks in a room thick with smoke as they were told, yet again, of the Empire, and the pox, and they grinned when he winked at them. But he was nearly finished. He was nearly broken. He had no dignity left, no power to save himself. No nothing. Just Rosie’s letters and the thought of the hand that had written the words.

In the fifth week the Corporal left his bike outside the hut when the Sergeant had ordered it to be put away and the Corporal left their squad with the Sergeant’s language still thick on the air. The men blew up johnnies bought from the barber and let them fly from the door as he passed.

The Lance-Jack took his place, a new stripe on his arm and a voice which was not so loud, not so cruel, and now the fatigues ended and Jack slept at night. At last he slept and had the time and the privacy to dream of Rosie.

In September his squad cursed and swore on the assault course, feeling the skin scrape off their stomachs as they scrambled up and over the nets carrying packs filled with bricks, feeling the straps cutting into their shoulders, humping Sid up before them because last one home got fatigues.

They plunged from logs into murky water-filled ditches, spitting out filth, pushing against the weight of the pack, forcing their heads up and the panic down. They raced and beat the squad from Waterloo barracks in the cross country and the Lance-Jack bought them all beers.

They sat up that night and cheered as Nigel sang and danced and Sam called, ‘You’d make a lovely tart.’

Jack wrote to Rosie and told her. They watched new squads arrive and stumble and scramble, and tossed them cigarettes and told them it would be a bleeding picnic.

They shot on the rifle range, feeling the Yorkshire breeze in their hair, the first hint of winter in its coldness, lying full stretch on their stomachs. He wrote to Rosie and told her of the smell of the ground which still had the summer tight in its grasp, of the men, who were now moulding into a team, almost in spite of themselves.

They were paid.

‘One pace forward.

‘Two, three, salute.

‘Two, three, take pay.

‘Take paybook.’ Open top left pocket.

‘Pay and paybook correct, sir.’ Place pay and paybook in pocket.

‘Two, three, salute.

‘Two, three, about turn.

‘Left right, left right.’ Three bags full. Sir. There were drinks in the Naafi. Only a few days more then a transit camp. Postings came in. Sid was a clerk, Nigel a Sergeant in Education. He didn’t want a commission now. He was one of the men. Jack was a squaddie.

The next day, the last before the passing-out parade, they squatted on the grass with the weak late summer sun on their faces around a Sten gun which was taken to pieces by a dirty-fingered NCO.

Jack said, ‘Be gentle with the grass, Corp. It’s been very carefully cut.’ The squad laughed, the Corporal too.

The Corporal put the gun together, then took it apart again. Jack could smell the oil, see it beneath the Corporal’s fingernails, and he remembered Ed in that Somerset village. The oil beneath his fingers as he threw the ball to Jack, the drawl as he shouted at him to pitch it higher next time, the sun shining on his red hair. Where was he now? Why had he never written?

The gun was in pieces again. They tried to put it together and failed. They tried again and succeeded and the smell of the oil was heavy and it was the same as the smell on Ed’s hand as he had ruffled his hair and asked when his mom was coming down again.

‘The aim of war,’ said the Corporal, ‘is to kill the enemy.’

Sam murmured, ‘Don’t tempt me, sunshine.’

The others laughed and the Corporal called the comedian out to the front, standing Sam there, pointing to his head.

‘Don’t aim at his head. You’ll miss, and if you hit it, you’ll find there’s no brain, just air if it’s like this specimen.’

Jack pulled at the grass, floating it down in the faint breeze.

‘Don’t aim at his legs. You won’t kill him.’

Had Ed killed anyone? Had he sat in the sun and listened and learned. Ed had needed to. They didn’t. The war was over. Frank got over-worried. There was the bomb now. There wouldn’t be another war.

‘Aim at the body. That’ll get them.’

Jack had applied to become a clerk. It was a cushy number but he had been refused. The officer said his schooling was incomplete though his IQ was high and that he would be directed towards the Infantry because his rifle range report had been good. Jack looked at the Corporal and then at the Sten. At least he’d never have to kill anyone. And nothing mattered now, because basic training was over. He was going home after passing out tomorrow. For two whole days he would be home, with Rosie.

The carriage was as full of smoke as it had been on the journey up to Yorkshire, and the floor as littered with cigarette stubs, but now it was different. They had passed out. They would not have to go through anything like that again. Nothing as bad ever again.

They were to be clerks, teachers, wireless operators, or squaddies and then their lives could begin again. And for the next thirty-six hours they were going home. They all laughed again, as Sid won a hand of cards and Nigel dealt another on the table they had made by heaping a coat over a kitbag.

Jack looked out of the window, the cards worn and slippery in his hand. Rain raced down and across the glass, jagged from the slipstream, and he could see little, but as they drew near London the houses grew thicker. There were chimneys belching smoke, there were the same damaged buildings. Nothing had changed in two months. But what about the people? What about his family? Were they all right?

The train was drawing in, shunting, slowing, stopping. They hauled kitbags out on to the platform, then up on to their shoulders, walking in a group. The smell of London was the same but Jack felt as he had done when he returned from Somerset. Strange, different. And his home had been different too. Was it now?

They took the Underground or other trains, waved, slapped shoulders and couldn’t say to one another how they felt. This had been a family, and now they might never see one another again. So they waved, laughed, looked away, looked back, and Nigel, Sid and Jack stood still, looked, nodded then drifted into the crowd. What else could they do?

Rosie was waiting at home, at the entrance to his back yard. The rain had stopped, the fog had settled, raw, close. He saw her as he walked down the alley, leaning against the wall, her scarf round her mouth, her coat belted, the collar up. He watched her straighten and run and heard the thud as his kitbag rolled from his shoulders into the drain and then she was there, in his arms. He pulled down the scarf, kissed her warm lips, searched her mouth with his, felt her against him, her arms around him, and the strangeness was gone. She was here. He was home.

‘They’re all right,’ she said into his neck. ‘There’s been no rows. No trouble.’

Then there was the sound of running feet, panting breath, and Lee was there, clasping his leg, crying, laughing, punching, and Jack picked him up, threw him into the air, caught him, hugged him. He hadn’t changed. It had only been weeks. It seemed like years.

Ollie and Maisie bought in beer from the pub, and Rosie ate with them because Maisie said every minute was precious when you were in love. Rosie looked away from the bleakness of her eyes, back to Jack who sat balancing on two legs of the chair. He was broader, fitter. A man. And when he had held her she had felt shy against his strength, against the roughness of his stubbled chin, against the voice which was deeper, stronger.

‘Do you still love me?’ she had asked.

‘More than ever. You are what I dreamed of at night. You are my world. You keep me going and you keep my family safe for me. I shall never love anyone else.’

She had felt the pulse in his throat as she touched his neck and then his hands where the scissors had scarred. She picked up his hands and kissed them.

The two days passed too quickly. Rosie waved from the back yard. He wouldn’t let her go with him to the station where they would be pushed and pulled by the crowd, where he would see her face as the train left.

She watched as he walked up the alley, listened as his footsteps grew fainter.

She wrote to him at the transit camp, and then to the Barracks when he moved on there. He wrote to her of guard duty, the inspections, the charging of his friend because of a dirty buckle.

He wrote of the Corporal who read out the Guard Duty orders, issued them with bicycle lamps, whistles and pick-axe handles, allocated the stags, or shifts. He drew second stag – 2030 to 2230 then 0230 to 0430. He wrote of the route they walked, the huts they guarded. He wrote of the hours they spent guarding nothing against nobody.

As November became December he wrote of rifle practice. How he would lie on a groundsheet, feeling the iciness of the earth seeping up into him, seeing his breath white before his face, feeling his fingers hurt with the cold as they held the rifle, then the numbness.

He told of pushing home the ammunition clip with the palm of his hand, seeing a red and white flag for a miss, but more often it was a bull.

He told her he loved her, missed her, and knew that she must love him because she stayed for his sake to help Maisie and Lee, when she could be in America.

On 20 December Rosie made paper chains with Lee, but in Lee’s house, not Norah’s because Norah would not allow the mess, and she was glad that Jack was lying on groundsheets firing at targets because the British were launching the biggest drive yet against the rebels in the Malayan jungle and that could have been Jack, but it wasn’t. Thank God, it wasn’t.

She strung the paper chains around Norah’s kitchen, though she had not wanted any, but Grandpa had always liked them. She helped Maisie do the same. Balancing the step ladder while Maisie reached up, pushing the drawing pin in, laughing because Lee was laughing, and soon they all were, even Ollie who came through the door with a bottle of wine for Christmas and a message from the pub that Jack was coming home for two days’ leave.

They ate the turkey at Maisie’s because Norah and Harold were going to his mother’s for two days. She looked at Jack, and he at her, and she barely tasted the turkey, because he was back. This year there was no perfume for Maisie, no need for Rosie’s lies, and she drank her wine, her shoulders easing, because soon perhaps she could go to Nancy and Frank. 1950 promised to be a good year.

Jack walked her back, into the empty house, up the silent stairs into the boxroom where ice crept up the inside of the windows and the chill dug even through their coats. He wouldn’t let her stay up here where it was so bleak and carried her mattress, her bedding, and laid it where Grandpa had slept, where he slept next door.

She watched the muscles in his back beneath his shirt as he stirred up the fire, straightened the blanket made of cardigans. She watched his arms as he tucked the blankets under the mattress. She watched his face as he turned and held out his arms to her and the bed was soft and warm now as they lay together, and his hand undid her blouse, traced the shape of her breast, and his lips too touched her flesh and his tongue licked her skin and it was the right time where Joe had been the wrong time and the wrong person.