In the drying-rooms Brian would pick up a reject piece of cardboard and test Bill on conventional signs, grid references, scales, and representative fractions, and on how to allow for magnetic variation in true and compass north. The board would become a mass of complex symbols, Chinese to anyone who didn’t know what they meant, and Brian also taught him how to make a profile plan from a line across contours, explaining glibly the difference between vertical interval and horizontal equivalents. His knowledge had come from a manual of map-reading discovered one Saturday afternoon in the bookshop down town. He had studied the book passionately for a few weeks, but had forgotten it when his involvement with Pauline began, until Bill had blurted out one morning that he was having a hell of a bleddy time studying for Cert A because he couldn’t make head nor tail of maps.
Bill also had volunteered for the double-time of flue-cleaning, but Brian, now working late into the afternoon and having cleared almost one whole side of the stoke-hold (fed up and dead to the wide, choked with soot and sweating like a pig), suspected he’d been set on an easier job, such as standing in the fresh air of the yard and hauling soot-buckets up on the rope, ready for the lorry. Or maybe not. He’d heard the gaffer say he was to help on the right-hand flue later because they hoped to finish it that day so’s the stoker could light up straight away. If Bill’s shirked, though, he’ll get no more map-reading out o’ me, the jump-up card. What a pal, though he’s a bleddy sight better for a bloke than the no-good gaffers. All they want is higher production and more money in their pockets. They can afford to be patriotic; so would I be. Rawson’s supposed to be the best of ’em, but even he’s a bastard: Brian had lost his soft first hour of a morning because Rawson had seen and presumably disliked the words SECOND FRONT NOW along the bottom of his office map, Brian being told by the cleaning woman that another boy had been sent in from the factory to take his place. Which is all the thanks and appreciation I get for moving his pins to the proper places.
He swallowed a mouthful of dust and kept going, almost at the turning where he hoped to meet Bill Eddison coming up the other side. He was bitterly tired, as if someone or something were pressing cotton wool on to his eyelids, and the temptation to put down his shovel and go to sleep was hard to resist: it was the sort of acrid tiredness that afflicted him most afternoons with a softening of the limbs, a combat to keep his half-closed eyes from completely shutting off the active world. Usually it carried itself on with too much colour in the revealing glare of light or sun for him finally to ignore it, but now pitch darkness was allied to warmth and the soft breath-catching atmosphere of dust that he automatically shovelled into the shallow pan between his legs, and the natural urge was to curl up to the odorous bank of soft soot and say goodbye to the conscious world of his thoughts. But though the undermining desire was there, the words were not, and his fight against the desire gave the words no chance to break through. His simplified existence was kept in balance by the renewed swinging of his spade, its dig soundless when soot lay high, softer than butter to go through, like skimming the top of velvet. The noise was satisfying when bricks were reached, a muffled scooping of the steel blade along them. In some places near the back the soot had solidified into small porous balls, and here it was hottest, an intolerable climax of his flue-cleaning day.
He did a belly-crawl away from the front line every few minutes and lay on his back until hands and knees had cooled, then he rolled over and went forward again. I’ll bet there aren’t things much worse at sea. You might die quick there in a storm by drowning, but here you could easily snuff it by inches, of consumption — though God knows I can’t say which is worse: a life on the treadmill or to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Thank God I don’t have to take my pick. A shovel’s all I need, so’s I can dig myself out of a grave as well as into it like I’ve done today, or look like doing if I’m lucky and get cracking faster than I’m doing now. It’s no good staying here too long, buried like a corpse in the dusty guts of Robinson’s old factory, shovelling the gold of my heart out for all I know, hour after bleeding hour where I can’t see a thing — though I expect I’d make a good collier. Even though I’m not small, I’m getting practice sticking a thing like this, so if I’m lucky I’ll get to be a Bevin Boy instead of being sent to fight the Germans, though I’d rather do neither but go my own way to Kingdom Come.
He was working faster than he’d done all day, driven by some inner motor to a higher speed instead of slackening off, slicing the spade into the last few feet of soot to be cleared, scooping it into the pans, and using the flat of his hand as a sweeping brush to gather into a heap what the spade was too clumsy to reach.
The day had gone: he hadn’t seen it get light and wouldn’t see it get dark. I’d go off my loaf if it was like this every day. It occurred to him that he was working too fast, heart racing and throat bone-dry, arms aching too much to control. Why? he wondered. What for? he asked himself. Come on, can you tell me that? Why are you going so mad-headed? Why don’t you take your sweat, you barmy bleeder? He had already stopped, pushed back the pans, and lay full length, a blissful going like a pint of thick mild into his limbs. What’s the point of going so hard? If you don’t finish today, you’ll finish tomorrow.
But he wanted to get out of the earth, to see daylight and smell fresh air, to walk in the wind-thumped streets even if only to see the odd star above dark rooftops, to be out, away, a thousand miles off. He opened his eyes: “I’ll leave this putrid firm. I’ll get my release and go somewhere else, even if I have to bike five miles there and back every day. I’ve had enough of this, one way or another.” The thought made him happy and his spade scooped at the wall of soot. Between lying half-asleep and a refreshed burst of action, his mind had been blank; he wasn’t aware of thinking about getting back to work or making a decision — but a spark of life had exploded in his limbs and he was going forward even faster, ripping away the obstacle to he didn’t know where.
A spade that didn’t belong to him flew past his face and chipped a piece out of the brickwork, and suddenly Bill Eddison’s voice bellowed a foot away from the blackness in front: “Well, if it ain’t owd Brian! We’ve finished the bleeding thing at last.” They threw their arms around each other, and went on laughing in their victory.
CHAPTER 19
Alone in the camp library, a mug of tea at his elbow just left by the char-wallah, he unrolled an outline survey map of Pulau Timur. A fresh batch of radio operators had been flown up from Singapore, and fourteen days’ leave at Muka holiday camp had at last been handed out to him. He felt fresh after a shower, not yet sweat-soaked from the uprisen sun, dressed in immaculate white shirt and shorts brought back by the Chinese dhobi woman an hour since: his finger traced the coast up from Muong and stopped at Muka — a palm-lined bay facing Gunong Barat across the few miles of flat, variously marked blues of the water. Between swigs of tea his eyes roamed the map: printed in 1940, he noticed, a time for history books — over the hill and far away, an iceberg melted by the ever-turning suns of time, a year he remembered vividly as the date when his cousins Colin and Dave one by one went into the army and one by one, after a few weeks, came out again. He watched them return when everybody else seemed to be going, a strange thing, though underneath his quiet curiosity at their khaki uniforms draped over a chair-back like the skin-trophy of some animal was a profound and unquestionable certainty that they were doing something right and good. Ada helped them, and so did the rest, for both climate and tradition were right for it. Out of a dozen able-bodied men in all remotely connected branches of the family, only two went into the army and stayed, and one was killed in Tunisia. “I told you so,” was the verdict of the rest, who either deserted or found their way into some sort of reserved occupation. It must be a record, Brian thought, for one family. Nobody can say we didn’t do our bit for freedom; though what I’m doing here I don’t know — except that there isn’t a war on.