When he applied for a day’s pass halfway through training the orderly sergeant flicked a mote off his row of medal ribbons; he had dandruff. ‘Your name, I knew a Thurgarton-Strang, in Burma. Any relation?’
Herbert regretted asking Isaac to rejig his Identity Card. ‘None, Sergeant.’
‘A real bastard, he was. But fair, very fair.’
A bus over the Downs took him to the bookshops of the south coast. At four and sixpence a day he could afford to be served with egg on toast or a cake on a plate in the tea shops of Chichester. On the way back he got off the bus and walked a mile or two along the footpath, to sit among the silent sheep and watch ships passing like ghosts in the misty Channel.
Far to the west beyond the green folds lay his first school, though he supposed the buildings were used for a different purpose now. Or they had fallen to pieces through ivy and neglect. With a notepad on his knee he wrote to his parents, telling them about his life since leaving school, knowing it was too late for his father to prise him from the drab khaki of a private soldier.
Eight weeks of summer training turned him into as good a soldier as he had been a machine-operator. When the sergeant-instructor went for a piss one day he came back to see Herbert showing slow coach Ashley Pemberton how to put the Bren together. He must have watched from behind a bush, Herbert surmised, who had not only named the parts but explained their function as he slotted them into place.
‘You know the lingo, as well,’ the sergeant said, as Ashley now assembled the gun with no trouble.
In a few weeks his lance-jack’s stripe came through, and he didn’t care that it distanced him even further from anyone who might have been friendly. Accustomed to being two people in the factory, he had turned more solitary now that he was one again, and he liked the feeling that relinquishing his guard separated him even more from those roundabout.
The others were surprised however when he joined a darts game in the NAAFI. The click of steel tips hitting grid wires was a sound hard to resist. Pint in hand, he watched for a while till a private said: ‘Fancy a throw, Corporal?’
‘Down from three-o-one?’
Barraclough sat nearby. ‘Watch he don’t cheat.’
‘I never do that.’ But he left him alone.
He won four games out of five, and rather than walk away with a pound in his pocket spent it on beer for those he had defeated. ‘Pints all round. Have one as well,’ he called to Barraclough. ‘No hard feelings.’
‘Ah, all right, you bugger.’
Halfway pleased at having broken through his guard, they wondered where a toffee-nosed hard case like him had learned to throw darts with such accuracy.
The few bob a day made him abstemious, verging on niggardly after his easy-going factory time. A few pounds saved out of his pay, and from his wages before enlisting, gave enough to lodge at Mrs Denman’s on his first leave, and to take Eileen out as well.
She loved her soldier Bert, who was more unlike one of the factory blokes than ever now that he had joined up. The loudmouth pose had never seemed natural to him, and now he was quiet and even polite, which led her to think he really loved her.
Herbert found it easy to get her up to the bedroom while Ralph was out at ‘business’. Disembodied from the everyday world, a feeling almost of sin at all other men being at work, he drew the curtains, took off his clothes and watched her do the same. She had pleaded a day off, but at other times she would rush from the factory in her dinner break to pass half an hour in his arms, no opportunity to eat anything before getting back to the factory. ‘I can live on love,’ she said.
He marvelled at the pale delicate skin of closed eyelids when she gave herself to him with loyal passion, and afterwards hinted at how their intimate courtship ought to become more formal now that he was a responsible adult in khaki. This turned him back into Bert, though only to himself. Not bleedin’ likely! He sensed in his deepest gut what she wanted. She craved that their togethering would go on forever, for them to be hugger-mugger in bed all night and every night, a situation in which he — her Bert — would get up, as he should in the morning, make his own breakfast, and go out to work, while she languished an extra half-hour because of her swelling belly. She would stand like a proud Daily Mirror mum with other women in the grocer’s queue to buy the weekly rations, then go back home to make the beds, wash up, and cook some slop for their supper. She could tek a running jump at herself — though he had to admit it was impossible not to believe they were profoundly attached, he in love with her, if she liked to put it that way.
And yet, like a blade of light straying around their most delicious joinings, he recalled his hopeless juvenile yearning for Rachel, saw her oval peach-coloured face and large blue eyes from behind the topiaristically sculptured bush and across the ‘Dig For Victory’ lettuce patch as she strolled so unwillingly with Dominic and her parents. At times he imagined going softly into her, in the depths of some wood on a hot summer’s day, she lying with legs as open as Eileen’s and giving kisses as welcoming. He would shudder into an ejaculation sooner than intended, but felt such a fantasy was worth it, and in any case not much time went by before he could rise again.
A long-term plan for seeing Rachel came to mind. She had pushed out a lizard tongue of contempt that first time, but almost seemed to like him after he had forced that little runt Dominic to make an introduction. She would be taller now, with shapely legs, and nice breasts (though not as big as Eileen’s) and would hold his arm in the most adoring way as she talked about paintings and the latest books he would by then have read. She would admire his quotations from Ovid, or look adoringly as he modestly related his adventures after coming back wounded — though not disabled — from some jungle or desert skirmish. The idea of never seeing her again made his heart ache miserably, putting him for a few minutes through a whirlpool of emotion he had thought himself too adult to bother with but which was relished for old times’ sake.
He certainly didn’t intend sinking as far down into the life of a factory chap as to marry Eileen, warm and wonderful though she was in bed. He anchored his expectations, and therefore hers, from one day to the next. Whatever notions she had of their future were no concern of his. He ignored her hints, open and more plangent towards the end of his leave, except for vague agreements as to the kind of life she longed for. Being silent but polite was the best way of getting her into bed without too much awkwardness, and at such times, which she mistook for the possibility of acquiescence towards his responsibilities, her simplicity and trust was guaranteed to give him a good time and, he was sure, to go by her cries and behaviour, satisfy her as well. He teased her about the dreams she related, long and tedious narratives that got nowhere.
‘I like to dream,’ she said. ‘Dreams mean summat, that’s why I tell ’em yer. Last night I dreamed you and me was looking at a house to live in.’
She wanted him to say how nice. ‘Lovely, duck. I dreamed I was walking over a frozen lake, and the ice gave way. It was ’orrible.’
‘Yo’ would, wouldn’t yer?’ But he couldn’t deflect her. She was, what was the word? — irrepressible. ‘I read horoscopes every day in the paper.’
‘And you believe in ’em?’
‘Course I do. They often come true. It might sound daft, but I like to.’
He didn’t care what she dreamed, or what she read, only wanting her to be happy in the way he wanted to be happy. She mostly was, or seemed to be, seeing that if not she might drive him away. He envied her, living on the edge of her nerves — and her experience. When she couldn’t help but be moody his annoyance was marked by an even deeper silence, which brought her to earth more quickly than any argument. She then tried to be more cheerful, assuming he was discontented at being a soldier, and at having to leave her when his furlough came to an end — just as any young man would be.