Growing Up In a War (50 page)

Later in the evening, I found myself unable to get my mind round the fact that I would never put the same clothes on again. I had lived in them for nearly seven years, and taken them for granted. Now, as I removed each garment in turn, I did so in the knowledge that I would never wear it again: first the deep-blue ankle-length coat, with all its silver buttons and velvet trimmings; then the white bands and the Hamlet-style shirt; then the mustard-yellow stockings; then the hard, tough-wearing knee breeches, grey, with those silver buttons again. I occasionally wear two of them now as a pair of cufflinks.

It seemed to me that I had no choice but to leave school and go out into the world; there was no practical alternative. But so much had been lost in so short a time. First there had been my grandfather, then my father, now my first lover, plus the world I had lived in for seven of my most formative years. I was not yet eighteen, and had lost the three people closest to me. This was not a self-pitying reflection – on the contrary, it was factual, and my attitude was stoical, accepting of the inevitable. Nor was I backward-looking: I knew I had to move on, because life moved on.

But I had been naive to suppose that because I had asked the bureaucracy to call me into the army as soon as possible they would do so. When 12 April came, the first thing I looked for in my birthday post was my call-up papers. They were not there. The rest of April passed, then the whole of May, and still no sign of them. I thought now that I had lost all chance of getting out of the army in time to go to Oxford in October 1949. My position at home was embarrassing too. I was still living in the rent-free
room
in my mother’s flat, but it began to seem an age since I had told her that I would join the army on my eighteenth birthday and be off her hands for ever. I began to wish I could have gone back to school, where the summer term was now in full swing, and await call-up there. The fact is, of course, that I could have done, just as other boys did, only I did not know it. I became nostalgic for what I was not experiencing, and would never now experience – for what people were constantly referring to as their unforgettable last summer term, when they had secured their place at university and had nothing to do but enjoy themselves. I might have had all that and Jill too. But by forcing everything forward a year I had forfeited the whole experience of life at the top of the school. After one more term I would have been a house captain, and a school monitor, one of those god-like figures who had the world at their feet and on whom the sun shone perpetually, who were occasionally to be glimpsed on summer evenings casting long shadows across the grass of the main quad as they sauntered over to drinks in the headmaster’s house while everyone else was working. They were doing it now, at this very moment, and I might have been there (as of next term) if only …

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘
WAKEY! WAKEY!
’

I have never hated any other two weeks of my life so much as I hated my first two weeks in the army. It was made hateful for us deliberately, as a form of the age-old policy of ‘breaking in the recruits’.

I was in a camp on Salisbury Plain, in a barrack room with a couple of dozen young men of my own age from all over Britain – except for one, Paddy, a twenty-eight-year-old from the Republic of Ireland. Having been resident in Britain for some time when the Second World War broke out, he received call-up papers from the British Army, whereupon he immediately skipped back to Ireland and spent the rest of the war there. However, the British authorities lay in wait for him throughout the war and beyond. Three years after it ended he came back, and was instantly arrested as a deserter and handed over to the army.

‘The first lot of leave I get I’m going over to Ireland and I’m not coming back,’ he said, openly and cheerfully. Which is what he did. There was no legal way of stopping him.

Each day began at six o’clock, when we would be fast asleep from the exhaustions of the previous day. The ear-jangling sound of a bugle blown with bursting lung power outside the window made the bones in our head judder. At the same time a six-foot-six sergeant crashed in through the door shouting, ‘
Wakey! Wakey!
’ and ran round the room tipping everyone on to the floor with
mattress,
bedding and all, yelling nonstop into our faces: ‘
Come on, get up! Up! Hands off the joystick! Wakey, wakey!
’ We came to consciousness on the floor in a heap of violence, chaos and cacophony. And from that moment we were hounded and harassed through the day. The declared object was to break any resistance we might have to obeying orders, and replace that with automatic compliance, however ridiculous the order. Hours of every day were devoted to mindless drill, old-fashioned square-bashing, during which we were roared at and abused. ‘Get it together, you lot – you sound like a splatter of shit from a duck’s arse! … No, you silly cunt, your other left! … You, Smiler at the back there, get with the rest of us – you’re standing around like a spare prick at a wedding!’ and so on and so forth. Other hours were devoted to soul-destroying tasks of deliberate pointlessness. One day we spent half the morning lugging heavy crates from a warehouse at one end of the camp to a warehouse at the other, and as soon as the job was finished, and we were exhausted, we were ordered to carry them back again. Another day we were instructed to blanco our webbing the purest white: we were berated, each one separately, for not getting it white enough, until finally, when we all had it perfect, a sergeant major marched us to a coal tip, stirred our webbing around in it with his swagger stick – to a running commentary of sadistic derision – and then ordered us to start again. Another day we were all issued with nail scissors, marched to a lawn, and ordered to cut the grass; and there was nothing for it but to get down on our hands and knees and cut the grass with nail scissors.

These ploys, I was later to discover, were all well-known and old-established spirit-breakers of long tradition, but to me they were new, and they had the opposite effect: they induced hatred and revolutionary violence. I have never felt such hatred: I would have blown the whole place up if I could. My rage was so colossal that it is difficult now to believe that the entire experience lasted
only
a fortnight. But that was only for me: for the others it lasted six weeks. We had embarked on a six-week course of so-called basic training, during which our future in the army would be decided; and I had no idea that I was about to be taken out of it so soon. In my mind the hell of it stretched for all those weeks ahead, so I dug myself in for a long campaign of endurance. We were not even permitted the solace of creature comforts at the end of a long day. We slept between the roughest of blankets, without sheets, and washed and shaved in cold water. The latrines were an offence to high heaven. I cannot pretend that the food was worse than at Christ’s Hospital, because that would not be possible, but it was not much better. Many of the men bolted their lunch in ten minutes so as to have the rest of the hour to themselves, as being their only haven of sanity in the day.

It was a degraded and degrading existence, hideous beyond anything I had been capable of imagining at that age. Once, behind the scenes in the cookhouse, I saw one of the hags who worked there put on a public performance of squeezing a giant parsnip slowly up her vagina to the encouragement and applause of her colleagues, and sign off the act by tossing the vegetable into the cookpot for the men to eat. All around were corruption and petty thieving on a monumental scale, and people who said ‘fuck’ several times a sentence (sometimes in the middle of a word, as in abso-fucking-lutely), and furtive, desperate sex in corners with women who worked in the camp. I began to realise that this was probably what armies had been like since the beginning of time. But for the authorities to allow it to go on to the extent that it did showed unbelievable contempt for the soldiery, the assumption that they were little better than animals.

And they were, I have to admit, a rough lot. Inevitably, they were chiefly from families of the industrial poor, because that was what most people in Britain were in the 1940s. Several were not able to write a letter home, and one or two could not read. I was
the
only individual in my barrack room to have pyjamas: the rest slept in their underwear. The young man in the next bed to me had never seen pyjamas, and asked what they were. Another remarked that it was ancy-fancy of the army to break our meals up into courses. He had never seen that before, he said: at home there was one good plate of something and that was it. He could not see the point of this courses business. Most of the men were away from their families for the first time in their lives, and had known only one background up to now. They were also, because they were out of their element, unsure of themselves behind their tough, yobbish exteriors, and this made them easy to lead and to influence.

The sergeants who trained us were a hardbitten bunch in their late twenties who had fought through the war. They had achieved a degree of promotion and authority which they now preferred to keep by staying in the army rather than go back to civilian life. Some had had horrific experiences, and had killed people. My platoon sergeant, Sergeant Smith (or, as he gave his name, Sarnt Smiff), had shrapnel holes in his face, and what with this and being six-and-a-half feet tall looked like a monster in a horror film. The sergeants in general looked on us eighteen-year-olds with benign contempt: we were milksops who had seen nothing and knew nothing. They liked to needle the well-educated ones, because the assumption in those days was that these were going to be officers, certainly most of them. Once, when I had committed some transgression in the ranks, and was standing to attention to be reprimanded, the sergeant marched up to me, stood right up against me, his toecaps touching mine, and said directly into my face, in a voice that started under quiet control and rose to something like a scream: ‘Private Magee: if I meet you in six months from now I shall probably have to stand to attention when I talk to you, and call you sir, but by fucking Christ …’ and then a stream of abuse, most of it obscene, that seemed to go on for
several
minutes. In his own mind he was, I think, unburdening himself of his feelings about the officer class to one of them while he had the chance.

To determine our future we were given aptitude tests, and interviewed individually about what we wanted to do. I said I wanted to go into the Education Corps. I said this because I detested the whole military side of the army, and had heard that if you went into the Education Corps you found yourself either teaching illiterates to read and write or giving classes in subjects like civics. I thought these were things worth doing, and I could get some genuine pleasure out of them. I awaited the call.

Instead, a notice went up on the board informing everyone (including, incidentally, me) that I had been transferred to the Intelligence Corps. I would, it said, be reporting in a couple of days’ time to the School of Military Intelligence in Sussex. I had never heard of the Intelligence Corps, or its school, and went to the Colonel’s office to ask what all this was about. I would, they informed me further, be given a three-month course of training at SMI (as they called it) and would then be put to work in some intelligence job. Did this mean, I asked, that I would miss the rest of basic training? In reality, yes, they said, though in theory the rest of my basic training would be incorporated in the SMI course. (The rest of what? I wondered.) My overriding reactions were relief, surprise, and an awareness of my ignorance of the whole situation. I still did not really know what any of this meant. Throughout my years at Christ’s Hospital, leavers had been going straight from school into the army – and during most of those years I had myself been training in the Officers’ Training Corps – so I thought I knew about the alternatives that would face me. Now, suddenly, there was this, something completely unknown. No one else from my intake was going with me.

I made the journey to the School of Military Intelligence by
train,
accompanied by a corporal whose job it was to ensure that I did not desert. He handed me over and returned.

The home base of the Intelligence Corps was an army camp just outside a village called Maresfield, which in turn was just outside the little town of Uckfield. By now I thought of myself as having half grown up in Sussex, not only because of Christ’s Hospital but because of Worth before that. Now here I was back again. Conditions in the camp were primitive, but I was used to that.

The atmosphere could scarcely have been more different from the camp I had just left. When I found my barrack room and sorted myself out with the other new arrivals, I found that all of us had just come from public schools or grammar schools and were heading for university. Life, after multiple fracture into two weeks of degradation, began to feel as if it might come back together again.

Next morning I was raised gently to consciousness by a quiet knocking on the door of the barrack room. I opened my eyes and found myself looking at a sergeant major standing in the open doorway, elegantly dressed. With an air of friendly diffidence he was tapping the wooden panel with his swagger stick. When a stir went round the room, and he knew he had woken us up, he said: ‘It’s eight o’clock, chaps. You’d better get up if you want any breakfast.’ He turned round and walked away.

I thought then that I had come to the right place.

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