Owning Up: The Trilogy (37 page)

One night too, five vicars marched in. Hearty and unshockable, they had come to fight the good fight.

‘Come to save me fookin’ soul!’ yelled a very drunken girl from Bradford.

‘If I can, sister,’ said the leader of the troop bravely.

A year later, my atheism confirmed by Surrealist doctrine, and my anti-clericalism fed at the same source, I would perhaps have felt it necessary to insult the Men of God in imitation of Benjamin Peret in that famous photograph, but that night I was prepared to dismiss their prayers and hymns among the indifferent clientele of The Dick Turpin as ‘noble but misled’. I wrote as much to my mother, adding pompously that I found ‘negative stupidity and the belief that civilisation was a refrigerator in every home, worse sins than drunkenness and copulation’.

I was in love with squalor then, and scoured the city for it, usually finishing the night drinking Camp coffee in a filthy little café. We’d struck up an acquaintance with an old woman there called ‘Cigarette Liz’. She wore a cap and stank of mildewed pennies, a complaint she put down to a canker.

‘Me ‘usbands used ter beat me,’ she croaked. ‘All me ‘usbands did, but they all knew about me money and drew out insurance policies. There’ll be four or five of ’em wrangling over me when I’m gone.’

I listened attentively. She went on: ‘There was a rat wot lived in me tent when I camped out on the waste-land.’ The Waste Land! The rat’s foot stirring the bones in the cellar in ‘The Straw Men’! The literary echoes produced an immediate know-all
frisson.
I must remember to point them out to Percy next day, I told myself.

‘Did you feed ’im, Liz?’ asked the enormous, pregnant pro- prietress; her ninth she’d told me.

‘Yes. On fish. You should have seen ‘im swim. Fookin’ water-rat he wus.’

Dickensian cackling.

‘There was a rat wot used to come in ’ere,’ said the cafe owner, not to be outdone. ‘Used to come in this very shop and go “wee wee” at me. “ ’Ere’s me rat,” I’d say, but the young chap wot ‘elped with the chips said: “Bugger you and your rat!” That’s what ’e said, “Bugger you and your rat!” ’

Harry, like most of the heterosexuals I became fond of during that period of my life, did his best to convince me that girls were better value. In fact, while at Wetherby, I was not particularly active anyway. Most of the writers were extremely prudish, and although Percy and I had once spent an evening out with two stokers from the camp’s ship’s company, it had led to little more than some heavy petting behind the boiler house, for by the time we came back on board we were far too drunk to get anywhere at all. Yet Harry’s proselytism continued. It wasn’t that he was in any way censorious. It was just that he believed it to be the lack of heterosexual experience rather than choice or inclination which dictated my propensities.

With what he believed my interests at heart, he would occasionally drag me away from The Dick Turpin and we’d spend the evening cruising a flyblown dance-hall where under a revolving globe of faceted mirror-glass, we’d try to chat up those girls too homely not to have been commandeered by the infinitely more glamorous and far better paid American service men. One night, just before Christmas, we scored; Harry’s girl being, of the two, by far the prettier. This I accepted as inevitable, Harry being not only better-looking but more at ease when it came to exchanging that mocking
badinage
which conversation demanded. We left the dance-hall after ‘The King’ and bought them fish and chips. Then, following a rather inconclusive snog under some railway arches, put them on the last train to the nearby woollen mill town where they lived and worked.

Before their train left, Harry’s girl had proposed a date, mine looking considerably less eager, and we’d agreed to make a foursome of it some ten days later. On our train back to Wetherby I’d expressed considerable dismay at the prospect. I’d found my experiences the reverse of satisfactory, let alone aphrodisiac. It’s true we’d kissed but, as I told Harry, her mouth tasted of batter from the fish and chips we’d bought combined most unpleasantly with the Fulnana cachous she’d been sucking. Furthermore, I didn’t like having her virulent red lipstick smeared all over my face and collar. There was no question either of ‘going further’ – a tentative attempt to feel her breast had been repulsed with a sharp slap across the wrist. Not that this had worried me particularly. She’d seemed to me both lumpy and pasty, her conversation limited to Palais catchphrases, and she’d cost me a lot of money as well. I added that personally I’d sooner have spent it getting pissed in The Dick Turpin.

I sat back on the dusty cushions of the unheated local train and sulked. In the mirror above Harry’s head I could see the lipstick smeared across my collar. Harry laughed. Had I forgotten we were going on leave, next week? They’d no intention of keeping the date, no more than we had. That was just a polite convention. His didn’t come across either. A prick-teaser and a waste of time. The next evening ashore we’d go to The Dick Turpin.

Christmas came. Paperchains in the NAAFI. Carols in the tin church. Harry was particularly affectionate as he knew I’d felt silly and inadequate, and he thought it was perhaps his fault. It may have been this that persuaded him to let me share his bunk after our turkey and plum pudding; an act of kindly expiation which led us close to the edge of disaster. Then, when that half of the trainees who’d been on leave returned, the rest of us set off for our four days at home; Harry to Wolverhampton, and me to Liverpool.

I was due back on 31 December and, no doubt because another exam was looming up, developed
en route
an agonising toothache. It was a Sunday and, after I’d changed stations, running between City and Central, each step jogging my tooth most painfully and sweat pouring down my face, I discovered that my efforts had been in vain. I had three minutes to spare to catch the nine o’clock train to Wetherby. It being a holiday, the ticket collector told me, with that smug satisfaction which all petty officials derive from transmitting unwelcome information, it wasn’t running. The next one was at
6
am. ‘A lot of your lads made the same mistake,’ he added. ‘They weren’t best pleased. None of ’em!’

I turned, resigned to a night at the YMCA, to find myself facing two viragos.

‘Why didn’t yer turn up to keep yer date today?’ snapped mine.

‘Aye, and where’s ’Any?’ demanded the other

Harry’s ‘polite convention’ had crumbled. Clearly his charm had persuaded his girl that he had meant it and she’d dragged mine along to prove it. Typically enough it was mine who was the more furious. I calmed them down – unexpected leave (lie); here was my pass to prove it; no way to get in touch (true); Harry desperate but his mother was none too well (two more lies). Gradual resignation on the part of the girls.

Would they like a cup of tea? Yes. Their train wasn’t until 10.20pm and so off we went and, with no need to prove myself sexually, we had quite a pleasant three-quarters of an hour, chatting away in a café near the station. They told me about their work, ‘the toil’ they called it, in a woollen mill, and what film stars they liked and how one of them, Harry’s, had been going steady with a soldier but had broken it off because he was ‘so thick’, and then, at 10.15, we strolled back companionably to the station, arm in arm, and I felt quite a dog. Two girls, one on each arm. Even my tooth hardly bothered me.

They got the tickets out of their Dorothy bags and we approached the barrier. Another official, dead ringer of mine, smiled with grim delight. ‘Aye, 10.20
most
Sundays,’ he agreed, ‘but Good Fridays, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve she pulls out at 10.10. There won’t be another now until morning.’

Both girls burst into instant hysterics.

‘What will me dad say!’

‘Oh bloody ’eck!’

‘You’ve never seen me dad wild!’

I tried to reassure them. Led them to a telephone box and sent off identical telegrams to their fathers: ‘Don’t worry. Missed train. Spending the night in Girls Friendly Society Hostel.’ ‘Love Barbara’ in one case; ‘Love Margaret’ in the other.

The woman taking it down, recognising a masculine voice, read them back to me with disapproving scepticism. She also told me neither telegram would get there before morning anyway, but I thought it judicious to keep this from Barbara and Margaret, who were beginning to look, if not cheerful, at any rate glumly resigned.

I looked up the hostel and found it to be in a distant suburb. Taxis were predictably hard to find but at last we got one going more or less in the right direction, although we had to share it with two randy soldiers and an old drunk, who kept asking what was wrong with a drink on New Year’s Eve at defensively frequent intervals. We eventually found the hostel, all lights off and in no way suggesting anything even minimally friendly. I rang and knocked for ten minutes. Eventually a sour elderly woman answered the door. She was in a dressing gown and a filthy temper. At first she refused to take them in. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘my mother is a prominent social worker in Liverpool. She’d be most interested to hear that two girls had been refused admittance on a dark winter’s night. Could I have your name, madam?’

Yet again that unfair confidence which is the birthright of the middle classes won out. She took them in, both expressing their gratitude, she admonishing them for their noisiness, rattling out the rules of the establishment.

So there I was alone in the laurel-haunted drive of a large Vic-torian private house on the edge of a city. My bad tooth, forgotten during the necessity for action, reminded me of its existence.

It took me forty minutes to walk back into Leeds. The streets were full of maniacs, people being sick, others roaring out the songs of the day. I caught myself reflected, looking desperate, in the window of a big store with a street lamp behind me. I’d never felt more miserable in my life.

The YMCA was full but they let me sit on a wooden chair with my tooth giving me hell. I caught the 6am train back to camp, but was in no trouble for being late as so many others were in the same boat. The tooth came out the next day. It had been abscessed badly, and they used procaine, a new local anaesthetic. I was well enough to take the exam, but predictably failed it. Harry and Percy had meanwhile both passed their finals.

A month later, the Commander sent for me. I’d flunked it again. Harry and Percy had both been drafted. There seemed no way I would ever escape from HMS
Demetrius.
I was beginning to feel a certain despair.

‘Quite clearly,’ said the Commander, looking through my file, ‘there’s no point in you going on like this. I suggest you get back into bellbottoms; in fact I’ve applied for you to do so. I don’t think they’ll say no and I can see you’re not exactly against the idea’ – this was obvious as I was grinning broadly and trying hard not to jump up and down – ‘Meanwhile, you can join the ship’s company on a temporary basis and make yourself useful in the galley.’ I saluted and once outside his office began to leap and gambol along the neat paths like a clumsy foal in the pale February sunlight.

For the next five weeks I worked in the galley, my hated fore-and-aft uniform becoming greasier and greasier. My colleagues were four WRENS, René, Joyce, Black Bess and Bambi, all of whom immediately accepted me as one of the girls. Together we mopped and squeegeed the concrete floor – we were meant to call it the deck but never did so – peeled mountains of potatoes, sliced the huge grey loaves of bread, and loaded and unloaded the washing-up machine, which smelt of babies’ nappies. I soon learnt to ignore the sudden clockwork-like emergence of one or more of the enormous cockroaches who lived behind it. We also did a lot of skiving and sat for hours at a time drinking ki (naval cocoa) and smoking like chimneys. I was riveted by the erotic adventures of René, Joyce and Black Bess, which they described with a remarkable lack of inhibition. Bambi, although by far the prettiest, contributed nothing to these revelations beyond an occasional ‘That’d be telling’ or ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ and then only when pressed by the others. I suspected that, while without censoriousness, she was saving herself for Lieutenant Right.

From the rest of the ship’s company, the stoker, electricians and sick-berth attendants, I learnt several dodges unknown to the transient trainees. By applying to attend the Methodist Chapel in Wetherby, for example, it was possible to dive smartly down a side alley while the rest of the column marched up a certain narrow street and to spend the Godbothering hour in the back room of a friendly pub, rejoining the genuine Nonconformists at the same point during their march back to camp.

I finally made it with one of the stokers, and wrote to tell Percy at his new posting in Colombo. I often wondered if he knew what I was on about. On account of the censors I felt obliged to be what was perhaps impenetrably oblique.

When my transfer came through, a very nice Leading Seaman, who had been responsible for the discipline in my class during my abortive attempts to become a writer, invited me to join the local batch of successful trainees for a final piss-up in a country pub. We got very drunk and all I can remember of the evening was a chill but brilliant sunset lighting up a stained-glass window let into the pub door. It represented a fox holding a fat goose in its mouth. How I got back to camp I can’t imagine, but the next day, with a formidable hangover but otherwise extremely happy, I set off again for Skegness.

4

To return seven months later to Skegness was like one of those recurring dreams in which the details are a little different each time. I knew my way around this time but I still had to move, like a somnambulist, through the same routine: same films on VD and the correct way to brush the teeth, same elementary drill and seamanship. God remained, according to the same chaplain, the Highest Officer in the British Navy. Yet there were changes too. Although the war was still on, its successful conclusion, in Europe at any rate, was only a matter of time. They’d cleared the barbed wire from along the sea front and were digging out the anti-tank traps on the beach. They’d even re-opened the small funfair; the proud shabby horses revolved on the merry-go-round for the first time since 1939. The ghost trains banged through the double doors into an innocent world of shrieks and spectres. Back in my bellbot-toms I felt reborn.