Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (25 page)

B
UTCHER THE BUTCHER
, a cutter-up of Army meat who works in the cookhouse, came off a seven-days’ leave twenty hours late, and was put under Open Arrest. Sergeant Crowne muttered: “’E was pushed once before, back in 1931. ’E was due back at midnight. ’E didn’t get in till midnight-forty. Forty minutes pushed. It was ‘Case Explained,’ though. Butcher’d got run over. There was what they call a Bright Young Thing: she sort o’ fell for old Butcher. She ast Butch to a party and give ’im … what do they call them? Mahrattas?”

“Manhattans,” said Sergeant Hands.

“Some Indian drink. So Joe Butcher walks into an Austin Seven. Actually, it’d take a Dennis truck to make a dent on Butcher. I b’lieve Butch smashed up the Austin Seven. Anyway, the police detained ’im, and ’e came back forty minutes pushed. I mean to say is, if Joe Butcher’s pushed twenty hours, there’s a good excuse. I lay five tanners to two Joe Butcher’s got a good bar. A smart soldier, Butcher the Butcher. Could of got tapes: but no ambition. Got blood pressure. Blood pressure! Stick a pin in old Joe Butcher and it’d come out like a bust water-main. Bags o’ pressure. I ought to know: I was first squadded with Joe Butcher.”

Then Butcher came into the hut. He is a garrulous man, but this afternoon he was silent. His mouth was shut tight. His shiny black crescent moustache lay still, like a shard of broken gramophone record. He had left camp in his best suit, the suit of Service Dress which he had preserved for twelve years and which he filled as a hard red apple fills its
skin—a burley, bloody-faced, full-bodied old soldier, instinctively meticulous in his dressing as only a Guardsman can be.

Now, no military policeman would have let him pass unchallenged. A triangle of cloth had been ripped from his left sleeve. The edges of his creases were blunted. His cheeks were yellowish: only his nose was red, with the sore redness of inflammation, where something had hit it hard. There were dark, stiff stains on his tunic to mark the trail of the blood. The jetty shine of God knows how many months had been kicked off the surface of his beautiful best boots. He had been
burnishing
his cap star for twenty years, until, of the
HONI
SO
IT
QUI
MAL
Y
PENSE
around the cross in the middle, nothing but
ON
…
IT
…
MA
remained. But the badge was gone. With my own ears I heard Butcher the Butcher refuse ten shillings for that badge—ten shillings in cash, and another badge thrown in. But he only laughed. Three of his tunic buttons were gone—regimental buttons polished away to blank domed surfaces. The cloth under his armpits was split: some terrible effort had burst it. He dragged his respirator on a broken sling. And where was his tin hat? The bayonet scabbard which Butcher had shone brown and bright as a house-proud woman’s rosewood piano, was scratched beyond spit, polish, bone-friction, and elbow grease—“scratched up all to Hell.” Butcher the Butcher was encrusted with stuff like ashes mixed with curry powder. He was bone-weary—a strong man drained and exhausted, a bled beetroot, a force used up, a chewed fibre, a weariness in mud-defiled webbing. There was a pouchiness about him.

The wireless was playing
Lord,
You
Made
The
Night
Too
Long
when he came in. Sergeant Hands was particularly fond of this song. But at the verse which says:

there was a
bip
as Hands himself knocked up the switch and said:

“Happened, Butch?”

Butcher the Butcher said: “Raid.”

“Get hit?” asked Sergeant Crowne.

“Only by a house,” said Butcher.

“You’re pushed,” said Sergeant Dagwood.

“Yeh, yeh, I’m twenty hours pushed. I’m under Open Arrest.”

“Okay?”

“Yeh, yeh,
I’m
okay.”

“Where was it?”

“Groombridge.”

“Railway terminus?”

“Yeh, Groombridge. Helped dig out few civvies. Due back: so what? Drill Pig says, ‘No excuse.’ Well, sod the Drill Pig. See people buried, you dig people out. Hauled lumps o’ house for eleven solid hours.
Basement
. No trains. Nobody gimme a lift. Slogged fifteen mile. I’m whacked. Forgot to get myself a chitty from the Rescue Bloke. Bleeding Drill Pig thinks I was in a fight. Oh, well,
I
sha worry. Lem gimme fourteen days! Lem gimme Royal Warrant! Lem semme to Devil’s Island frail I care.
Ffphut!
” Butcher the Butcher tries to spit with a dry mouth.

“Lively, eh?” says Dagwood.

“Bit,” says Joe Butcher. “Moo … moo … moo! Sireens. Like old cows; like lost cows, cows in pain. Ever hear a cow that lost a calf? Moo … moo … moo! Then these bombs go whizz, and bong! Ssssssssss—wheeeeeeee! Civvies in shelters and what not. I’m hanging on for a train. So I’m in a caff, getting a tea ’n’ a wad. Caff shuts up when the raid starts. I scrams. All va sudden ole Jerry drops one on a house. I goes arsover tip: blast … Dust! Talk about egg-wiped: Egypt was cleaned bright and slightly oiled compared to that dust! ’Stonishing dusty thing, a house. Sticks to the roof a your mouth like Banbury cakes.

“Sort o’ residential houses with shops underneath, kind o’ style. Busted like a Christmas stocking. There was a lil sweet-stuff shop. I got hit in the face with a choclit marshmallow. Honest to Jesus, a choclit
marshmallow. I scooped it orf me forrid and ate it. I got a tiny little bomb splinter in me leg, too; like a pinprick.

“There’s another house gorn nex’ door. Front wall down. I swallered a good bit o’ that wall. Shook meself clear o’ the debreece. Then some geezers comes up out a shelter; one old dear more ’n a million years old come Pancake Day yowping: ‘Me Georgie! Me Georgie! Upstairs! Me Georgie’s upstairs!’

“I says: ‘Upstairs, Ma?’ She says: ‘Upstairs, son.’ There’s practically no stairs. But this old geezer’s leading orf about ’er Georgie this, and ’er Georgie that, and ’er Georgie upstairs. It seems this Georgie’s the old girl’s old man. So I goes up. Looka my ankle where I shoved it through a busted plank! Old girl comes up after me. First floor back. I chucks down a ton o’ rubble, busts a way through, kicks down a door. I asks: ‘Who locked this door?’ and the old girl says: ‘I did.’

“Bedroom. Proper old-fashioned kip. Bloody brass bed like park
railings
… millions o’ brass. Bags o’ vorses and orlaments on the
mannel-shelf
, millions o’ chairs, and an aspradaspra on a stand all broke. On the bed there’s an old kite with a white beard, lying quiet. I says: ‘’E looks okay to me, Ma: kind of asleep.’ The old girl says: ‘As long as ’e ’asn’t fallen on the ground. ’Slong ’s Georgie’s still on the bed,
everythink
’s all right. You see, young man, we’re burying ’im tomorrow.’

“So I goes on back down. I carries the old girl. Then they say there’s people in the basement. So there isn’t much of a rescue squad, and they can sort of hear people kind o’ yelling out, so I has a go at the stuff with my bare forks. Look at me fingers!

“We clears a way. We cuts a bicycle inner tube in two and pushes it down. ‘Soup, Ma!’ we yells. And an old girl buried down there calls back: ‘Wish it was beer!’ I mean to say is, you can’t get some of these old girls down. Then she sort of screeks up the tube: ‘You better look sharp, there’s a young man ’oldin’ up the ceiling!’ So we digs like mad. Hours. Hours. They brung me tea, but I was sort of carried away. We gets down.

“There’s a sort of a basement, a kind of a cellar. In this kind of cellar
there’s an old girl, dead. Heart, or somethink. One old girl dead. Another old girl, cheerful as a cricket, very much alive. A kid of seven or eight, scared stiff, but alive. A gel o’ fifteen in high-sterics. A lil boy less ’n ten year old, smashed dead. And arched over ’em, like a sort of brick kind of arch … guess who?”

Silence.

“Well, who?” says Crowne.

“Guess,” says Butcher the Butcher.

“I give it up.”

“Remember Bill Nelson? Lance-Sergeant now. Squadded with us. Old Bill Nelson. Remember him?”

“Well?”

“Well, there was Bill Nelson. Been visiting friends. When the house come down, old Bill Nelson sort of kept the roof of the cellar up. He was thin, but he was wiry, old Bill Nelson. He sort of jammed himself up against the bricks and held ’em off the old geezer and the kids. Ribs busted, face busted, head busted. He was smashed up but he stood sore of in one piece. Gord knows how. He was busted everywhere,
internal
and out. There was a spike in the brickwork, a sort of blunt spike, drove right through him. But he held up. Some men can do it. I don’t know. Some men can. It ain’t strength. Just, somehow, some men sort of
can
. You knew old Bill Nelson. I knew old Bill Nelson. We fought the Wogs together. We was Guardsmen together. Once I
borrowed
a dollar off of him what I never give him back. Once he borrowed a dollar off of me what
he
never give
me
back. He was my pal.”

“Was?” says Sergeant Crowne, very quietly.

“Smashed to hell,” says Butcher the Butcher. “In the Groombridge Central Hospital. Can’t live. So you can say goo’bye to Bill Nelson.
I
knew old Bill Nelson. We was chinas. Decent when he was a
Guardsman
; decent when he was a Lance-Jack; decent when he was a
Lance-Sergeant
; decent when he was a full Sergeant. Quarter-bloke, C.S.M., Drill Pig, R.S.M., or Officer—Bill Nelson would of stayed the same. Decent. One of us. He’d of give away his shirt. He’d of give away
his eyesight and his right hand. He chased you; yes. But he’d go first, wherever he chased you. Good old Bill. So now he gives away
himself
in a cellar, for some old geezers and a couple o’ kids. That’s Bill, all through. Conscientious. He ought to of gone down in a fair fight in the open air, with a couple o’ dozen Jerries spread about and a pound weight o’ lead in his tripes. But no. On a seven-day leave, on a visit, down in a dirty ole cellar … that’s where Bill Nelson gets his. Not that he cared. Old Bill Nelson wasn’t scared o’ anything. But it ain’t proper. It ain’t right. Groombridge. Bill. Groombridge!”

“Where is Groombridge?” asks Corporal Bearsbreath.

“Oh … let me rest,” says Butcher the Butcher. “Be quiet and let a man get a bit of rest …”

“Nelson was born at Groombridge,” says Crowne.

“So he died at Groombridge,” says Butcher, and covers his face with a blanket.

*

I happened to know that at Groombridge Junction twelve tracks run precisely parallel out of the station and under the Iron Bridge. Beyond the bridge these tracks give off other tracks, which, in their turn, bristle like heads of barley with tributary tracks—and the tributaries branch, and the branches fork, and the forks reticulate, and the reticulations swerve, until, two hundred yards farther on, all the steel rails in the world seem to rush together, dreary and bewildering, twisting and
converging
, doubling and tangling, dully-shining like steel wool.

There is no peace. There is no quiet. Signals slam and thud
perpetually
. There is an everlasting smashing noise of shunting, a shouting of steam, a shrilling of little whistles and big whistles, a muttering of tortured iron. Sometimes, men between the tracks blow melancholy notes out of metal horns. When the fogs come down the Junction roars and hoots and bangs and wails, blindly worried in a hideous
yellow
dusk. Interminable goods trains stagger through. Twenty times a day some great express rushes past shrieking. For forty years, day in,
day out, night after night, the Junction has known no complete hour of unbroken rest.

The smell of the railway—that ponderous, nostalgic smell of hot iron and sulphurous smoke—sticks to the surrounding suburb. Here, countless tons of coal go up in smoke and drift back to earth in a soft snow of soot. It falls, flake by flake, from year to year; gently irresistible, mildly corrosive, persistent and insinuating; quietly eating up brick and stone, suavely blotting out the sun, softly besmirching newly-washed clothes as they flap dankly in the lugubrious, stinking winds.

Here, dirt must prevail. It devours housewives inevitably as
graveyard
soil. Sometimes they see, in a flash of awful perception, how they have spent their strength and beauty in the struggle against it; but they scrub on, soap-drunk, embittered and preoccupied, sore-eyed,
raw-knuckled
, enraged and engrossed, winnowed of hope. And still the smuts drift and the soot seeps in and coats everything, so that
Groombridge
is a black suburb, a chafed and miserable suburb, uncomfortable with dirt where it is not uneasy with scouring.

The dark, flat houses cling under the railway-bridges like ticks on the belly of a rhinoceros. The Railway owns them: railwaymen inhabit them. The mainstay of Groombridge Junction is the steady job-holder on the Railway—mechanic, porter, guard, or clerk. If you want slaves, offer men some kind of secure income, no matter how meagre—they will fight for the chance to fetter themselves head and heart, hand and foot, body and soul. Young men conspire to punch tickets in the
Station
. Expectant mothers, feeling the kick of unborn generations, think:
Please
God,
if
it
is
a
boy,
his
father
will
get
him
On
The
Railway,
and
so
his
future
will
be
assured.

The suburb and the people in it belong to the Railway, because its payday has the awful, the tremendous inevitability of an act of God. The well-behaved man on the Railway may look forward to a certain income, some promotion, and a little pension, with the calm assurance of a sectarian pietist contemplating a corrugated-iron-chapel paradise. He may buy things on the instalment plan, and firmly establish his
mode of life. The railwaymen of Groombridge Junction are steady. Salesmen of endowment policies do well thereabout. Burial Societies flourish. Groombridge looks ahead: before the end of July it has already put down a deposit on its Christmas turkey; by the middle of September it has already laid the foundation of its next summer holiday. Here today, here tomorrow. Once you settle in Groombridge, you stay. You live in the shadow of the Railway until that great occasion when you ride in state up the High Street, and strangers raise their hats to you, and mournful smuts float down to fleck the wreathed lilies that are dying with you.