Umbrella (47 page)

Shuttlecock, shuttlecock, if you don’t spin, I’ll break your bones and bury your skin
. . .
Released from their clayey restraint, Stan’s arms begin to twitch, his shoulders to heave – he is compelled to swivel round so he can search the sky above and to the right. — At Division there is only an encampment of huddling Amiens huts and a big marquee that must have been pitched especially for the show. Lit from within, its barber’s pole stripes wriggle to the tinkle of ragtime piano played by a cheeky chappie, who, as the troglodytes enter, pulls off his boot and runs his heel along the keys t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-ting-a-ling-dring-drang-ra-drong-gong!
He’s the spit of Fred D’Albert – maybe it is he? Wouldn’t you like to ride in my aer-o-plane!
The stage has been knocked up from duckboards and props with mud still on them – there’s no limelight only a row of hissing Tilleys. The men sit staring at the painted backdrop of a balustrade, on it a statue of an armless Greek goddess, and behind this a great crudely rendered mass of nasturtiums and sweet peas. The men – who are
a mess o’ rice puddin’
after the chinks, Hindoos and blackamoors below ground – have imposed their own hierarchy on this entertainment, with the brass at the front: a stout and red-faced colonel sits on a wicker chair dragged in from some fallow farmhouse that should be supporting a bent old back –
not this fat arse, should be creaking as Vieux MacDonald washes his ivories in a glass of pear brandy – not screeching reedy as Colonel-fucking-Blink squints through the Tilleys and takes a sip from his hip flask
. . .
Behind the officer, falling away, tier upon tier of bull-necked RSMs and military police, stoical sergeants and crapulent corporals ranged on benches – then, cross-legged on the bare earth, are the rows of lousy cropped mops and filthy gorblimeys, smaller and smaller, pipe-puffing Old Bills and waifish little Alphies, their heads bowed, shoulders hunched, hands cupped to protect the precious embers – all the way to the back flaps, where the bantams sit, their necks wet, their eyes dully regarding
the splendid show of all these khaki backs
. The Tommies mutter, groan, and shuffle to make room for the troglodytes, while the awed whisper goes round, Tankers . . . Tankers . . . the heavy bunch . . . In a way, Stan thinks, it isn’t too unfair an imposture – for aren’t we tankers of a sort? Behind their steel shield they too push forward inexorably, albeit rolling under all obstacles – rather than over. In the few minutes that they all sit watching Fred D’Albert rinky-dinky-plinky-plonking, Stanley eavesdrops on a drawling lieutenant of the Greys: Eeee-nor-mously foreshortened, blighter was only identified by his cigarette case – from Asprey’s, or so I’m weliably informed . . . And picks up other tit-bits:
Wilson re-elected, the Welsh Wizard in Number Ten, old Franny-Joe dead in ’is bed, Nastyputin shoved under the Russiyan ice
. . .
He listens, but is more absorbed in his own posture: holding still, clasping his own shaking hands – so absorbed that at first he doesn’t register the auburn bombshell who explodes on to the stage. She wears a patriotic dress: red bodice, white waist, blue skirts that froth up from the makeshift footlights to reveal
lovely calves.
We’re fuckin’ dead already, moans the man next to Stanley, because a woman is usually the last thing you see at the dressing station
when the shit from your punctured guts has poisoned your blood
. This, Stanley thinks, this is why X-rays were invented, to see through all that silk and linen, to reveal the clean white limbs and blushing cunny of Miss Dorothy Ward, who makes a low bow
so we all hang on her neckline
, then
lets fly with a blast of soft shrapnel that caresses us all.
I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! – the men all chorus and continue: Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty, is the place for me! Back and forth across the narrow stage she promenades, pushing up her derrière, flinging out her long legs, – and, despite the fug of wet wool and fag smoke, the beer-soaked breath and leering sweat, the hyacinth, the jasmine and the sharp urinous tang of her own sweet perfume falls gently on all of them – and now Stan hears the lines that came before,
Jack Dunn, son of a gun, over in France today, Keeps fit doing his bit up to his eyes in clay
. . .
That winter had seen skin left behind on the steel hafts of mattocks and spades, – it was too cold to melt the diesel oil in the engines they had rigged up to edge their Greathead shields forward, so the trogs sat tight in the frozen ground, deep in their burrows behind layer upon layer of canvas, a Rattenkönig biding its time, sallying forth only for food or fuel . . .
Each night after a fight to pass the time along, He’s got a little gramophone that plays this song
. . . Come the spring some went on up to Arras, marching by night along the winding strip of no-man’s-land, and by day taking cover underground – telegraph and telephone wires had been strung between the discontinuous tunnel systems, so that everywhere they arrived they found loving arms, warm soup, a dry straw palliasse on which to lay their heads . . .
Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care!
Stanley had been sorry to bid farewell to Michael, who felt it incumbent on him to aim south, to the Hindenburg Line, not believing that Nivelle’s offensive would be any sort of coup – let alone le dernier. There’s a duty my duck, he said. Frenchie is a proud fellow, and more lads coom down to uz at Vairdoon than anywhere else along the Front – it’ll be the same now: they’ve a stomach for a different fight, though! . . .
Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me!
— Squelching in the mud below Vimy Ridge, Stanley remembered Michael’s words. The tunnels here were deep and well secured – scores of generators had been brought down from the overrun German trenches, and some Jerry engineers had come down with them who were like the Wizard of Menlow Park when it came to knocking up pumps and other contraptions. Still, no pump could suck up this evil slurry, which churned into whirlpools that sucked in men trussed up in their greatcoats, entire field pieces, and on one momentous occasion a tank that wallowed into the tortured morass as the U-boats did beneath the seas . . .
Bill Spry, started to fly, up in an aeroplane, In France, taking a chance, wish
’
d he was down again, Poor Bill, feeling so ill, yell’d out to Pilot Brown: Steady a bit, yer fool! We’re turning upside down!
The world be turned that way, said a burly pilot officer, come down fléchette-fast, parting company from his spinning Camel two hundred feet up – or so he said – plummeting away from its twin Vickers, which went on firing lead arabesques, then slithering from the lip-into-the-cup, where the trogs had just opened an entry point. One minute I was up above, sculpting the very clouds and bein’ the very flower of chivalry – he was en route to return a dropped map case to a worthy foe – the next I’m down here in the depths with you mudlarks! Dinnae fash yersel’! cried the ex-drummer boy who first tried to restrain the aviator – then laid him out cold. From Huggins, the pilot, Stanley learned of the Petrograd rising. You lot’re bolshier than the Bolshies, he said, once they had taken him deep below and
shown ’im the ropes
– and he spoke of his wee terrier, Boinkum, left behind at Roclincourt. They lay there in the subterranean gallery, on their galvanised-iron platforms, looking up at the dripping earthen sky – and Huggins spoke of how Boinkum would howl when he wasn’t allowed to go up to the dogfights with his master. Fast friends they became – beneath Wancourt, Monchy and Thélus. Huggins grew fanciful, saying he could see clouds boiling in the mud and smell the wind of change in the miasmas of their tunnels and burrows. He had nightmares, waking terror-struck in the impenetrable darkness, Thousands of tire-Boches! he had seen, Thousands, thrustin’ down at us –! And of course, the world being turned that way, they were all hurled skywards and impaled on this fakir’s bed. Stan stroked Huggins’s rough curls and encircled the former pilot’s heavy chest with his wiry arms, cooing to him,
Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care!
— More than a year later they were still together, having been squeezed further north along the lubricated chute between the maddened masses – past Lens, Neuve-Chapelle and Fromelles, they arrived in time to experience the merciless bombardment of Passchendaele from below. It was around that time that the first doughboys joined them through the Messines craters, and, seeing these big western farm boys, filthy and demoralised, Stanley laid bare for them the state of affairs: The khaki cattle are on this side, see, and the field-grey ones gettin’ a taste of their own marmeladeneimer are over there. The wire separates these two breeds just as it does your livestock on the range – but that’s a bit thick, see, and one day, when the time’s right, the fences’ll be cut and all these chaps’ll mingle together, just as we do here – and then they’ll all go home. I’m . . . I’m as sure you’re like me as – damnit –! He and Huggins sang to the doughboys,
I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me!
In those doomdripped days they thought often of the London sewers – not as deep as the underground tunnels, right enough, but then: Not even bombs want to drop in the shit, said Stanley, who many of them had taken to calling Henry Morton, on account of his exploratory turn of mind. Greengage, a onetime sapper who had worked in them as a lad, spoke of their remarkable taint, how poking towheads down or pulling up dead dogs he would near-savour the blending of detergent and excreta, while the waters roared on through the glistening tiled culvert and over a subterranean precipice big enough to swaller a ’bus! The sewers, Greengage contended, are a place in their own right, not juss the love tunnels of rats an’ turds, but the bowels of the very metropolis, and as such necessary to the functioning of its monumental body: there could be no pretty faces promenading through Mayfair without the shitty business underneath . . .
Jack Lee, ’aving his tea, says to his pal MacFayne, Look, chum, it’s apple and plum! It’s apple and plum again! Same stuff, isn’t it rough? fed up with it I am! Oh for a pot of Aunt Eliza’s raspb’ry jam!
The troglodytes debated the wisdom of devoting their energies to making of their own shafts and culverts a drainage system, for the topsiders were drowning in the standing water now that the Flanders dykes and ditches had been destroyed.

Up above three thousand British guns fired four million shells. Below in their burrows the trogs smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and studied Sidgwick on ethics. They read the poetry of Robert Browning, learnt Arabic script from Ali the Zouave, or refined their understanding of surplus value and the public utility of social-credit unions. All those
phases of development
Stanley had found it so hard to concentrate on, he now he understood and could expound upon. Feydeau’s Discussion Club and its association with the Socialist League had all been minuted by him – so it was that in his underground reclusion he recalled the words of Morris and Kropotkin, the papers given by Missus Marx Aveling and Miss Schreiner. Those who descended had scant interest in the International Alliance of Women or the International League for Peace and Freedom – but Stan did. He sent his own emissaries aloft, and they came back with copies of the Ardent and The Freewoman, and with books by Miss Dix and Missus Perkins Gilman. Stanley explained to his comrades that: The future belongs to the feminised man, he who is capable of wearing cambric with pleasure – as we do – and of loving – as we do – and of regarding the fairer sex to be our own, and women to be to be not helpmeets but authorities on the blood-law of biology. So as to align still more completely with the emergent world-consciousness, Stanley obtained Southall’s Sanitary Towels and wore them one week a month – then he would not lie with Huggins. He sewed a fillet in his blouse and filled it with increasing amounts of sand, a half-pound per month, while encouraging the others to join in his couvade. And the troglodytes listened – and they approved, and many followed his lead, with the exception of Mohan, who, having been with Stanley since he first came down, felt free to chide him: Blighty, you should know this, Henry Morton, this is a Hindi word, bilyati – meaning foreign, you see. Now, taken up by the Britishers to mean their home, it will point back at them – a bilyati gun. And every time you say it, sing it, scream it, you fire the bilyati gun in your own face! . . .
Take me back to dear old bilyati! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care!
It was not until many months later – after the collapse of the Italian Front, the Bolsheviks’ rising and the taking of the Holy City, that a fellow called Cummins, who’d been a shop steward in Greenock, came down to them. He talked heatedly of Henderson’s constitution, and Stan said, Well and good – your catechism. Yet it’s so here already: what little there is belongs to us all in kind, there’s no sugar – so we’re never bitter. No man would think to lug one of the great shields into his own little pit! As for administration, what of it? A tunnel needs pumping and it’s all hands to the levers, a new one wants electrification and the men with know-how are parcelled up the line without any ado – these things simply happen. But, Cummins said, this is anarchism, man – there’s no system, no method, no means of carryin’ it forward as a programme for the nation –. To drown him out they all sang:
I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa!
And to inflame the doughty Scot still more, Stan planted a smacker on his dirty forehead . . .
Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me!
When Ludo broke through at Arras, Cummins – who had a stubborn sense of his own socialistic amour proper – said that this’d teach the trogs – who were in considerable disarray. Stanley and Huggins laughed at him. We’ll sail a lighter up the Scheldt! they cried. Don’t you see, it matters not a fig to us who’s victorious – there’re strikes aplenty in Germany, they’ve no more belly for it than the rest, it ain’t the Russkies who’ve capitulated at Brest–Litovsk, it’s Ludo, Fuckenhayn and Kaiser-bloody-Bill! — And Schmidt, from Köln, who had a lusty tenor, a nose that could smell a bottle of Moselle through sixty feet of cold dead mud, and a genius for organising chorales, led them into the verse,
One day Mickey O’Shea stood in a trench somewhere, So brave, having a shave, and trying to part his hair. Mick yells, dodging the shells and lumps of dynamite: Talk of the Crystal Palace on a Firework night –!
To vex the Scot further, Stan took the just-boiled dixie, and, making him a cup of George, handed it over, saying, The fucking Irish, they’ve got the right idea: no work – that’s the soup ticket! And Cummins smiled in a doubly-deboshed way. — It had grown quiet on this section of the line, and they’d been there so long the trogs had set the place up all snug: brought down glassware, a horsehair settee, two big old paintings of civic dignitaries from the remains of a Stadhuis, and a model of the pre-war coal mines that recalled to the troglodytes’ minds their own extensive tunnel system made awfully small. There was also a sheep dog who did gamely enough in his treadmill on a diet of Victoria’s Houndmeal that Stan ordered from Spillers of Cardiff and had delivered poste-restante to Boulogne. Brass quoits, a fifteen-inch-long crystal dolphin, a glass case full of stuffed hummingbirds arranged in a fleur-de-lis, a Chinese vase that held a variety of different parasols and ladies walking umbrellas – dressing cases, valises, portmanteaus, collar and bonnet boxes. Goin’ on a journey, are ye, Cummins grumbled, and Stan said, I rather think we will be soon enough. — The summer waned up above, and the febrile Tommies chased the feverish Jerries east – the subterraneans, unaffected by the pandemic, came boiling up