Silent Parts Read online

  A B Hassett

  PROJECT NOTES, October 2, 1968

  Stonewalling. And they’re the experts. What to do? I have nothing solid to incorporate into the booklet. Yet it seems obvious that Lew Broughton was the meddler, or that he was the principal force. I have found two Express articles from 1920 in which he defends ‘our brave lads’ against unspecified calumny. I imagine he thought he was preparing the way for Harry’s return to Australia, providing the covering fire. Yet Uncle Harry stayed put. Probably convenient for everyone.

  Mum is delighted with the idea of her anonymous French relations. I showed her a draft in which I speculated at their existence. For her it’s a small step from speculation to reality. I told her that Lambert is a common name both sides of the English Channel and that it would be near impossible to identify Uncle Harry’s descendants. She didn’t mind. I think she prefers this oceanic connection, Uncle Harry’s genes swimming around in the great swell of French Lamberts.

  thirty-five

  For two hours precisely each day – not a second more or less – they truss him up against a pole. A variation on crucifixion, Field Punishment Number One – but without the nails. He doesn’t feel in the least Christlike. The pain is searing.

  Pain in the ankles, pain in the knees where they have tightened the ropes so they eat into his flesh and cut the circulation. And they have hitched his hands high up the pole behind his back. The boots of past sufferers have worn a shallow ring in the ground so that he can’t get a proper grip with his feet, his toes always sliding lower than his heels. Which is why he doesn’t stand, but hangs, his arms taking most of his weight, the muscles of his shoulders burning. Once again it’s his size that aggravates the situation. He’s convinced the agony of a smaller man would be less.

  Hatless in the June sun, he is partially blinded with sweat. He can’t manage to wipe his face on his shirt, but regularly shakes his head or twists his whole torso away from the prevailing rays. He is careful not to lose patience, careful to husband his tolerance to last the distance. Best not to look at the other poor devils. The next man’s torment somehow exacerbates his own. To endure he must close off from others; plunge into the solitude of pain, submit. He would never have thought it possible, this ability to accept what can’t be changed or avoided. There is no slack in his mind for doubt, nothing extraneous, no person loved or hated. In the extremity of the moment he will last, is lasting, has lasted. And again. Over and over. They are wrong when they say he’s weak. He’s lasting.

  Afterwards he can’t appreciate the absence of strain. In the ten minutes before Parade he lies uncomfortably on his bunk in the common barrack, wishing he still had the privacy of solitary confinement. His hands and arms may cross limply over his stomach but his mind conceives of them as stretched and contorted. And while there isn’t the actuality of pain the shuddering continues, and an inner bracing.

  When the time comes he follows the other men out to stand in the sun. They’re called to attention – a rabble of shirkers, absconders and dishonourably wounded – and assigned to teams.

  ‘Coal fatigue,’ a prisoner explains while the provosts are busy. ‘Blackfella work for us, mate.’ It’s a chummy beginning, cheerful and ingratiating, the sort of all-in-the-same-boat camaraderie Harry only now discovers he’s missed.

  They’re marched to the prison gate and searched. One particularly conscientious guard peers into pockets, feels under collars and cuffs and has each man roll back the tops of his puttees. Eventually he’s rewarded with a couple of cigarettes, which he stows in his own pouch. ‘Many thanks,’ he says.

  Then they’re jogged out the gate and down the road, a tight phalanx escorted by a single Red Cap. Brought to a halt in a yard between blackened sheds, they’re issued barrows and broad-mouthed scoops. Harry is sent with half a dozen others to a concrete bay where the dust still hangs above a mound of anthracite. Already he feels it clogging his nostrils. Following the example of others, he ties a handkerchief over his mouth. Then, under the distant supervision of the provost, he falls into the simple routine of scooping and straining. The dust billows as his neighbour’s coal rattles in the barrow. Then he drops his own load. His breath is hot against the cloth. A gasp and he stoops again.

  The only respite comes in the intervals between barrows, after one has just been trundled away and the others are still not back from the hospital boilers. A couple of rough-nuts watch him closely. They aren’t put off by his reticence. A man’s story precedes him. ‘They reckon you were giving it to some little Froggy sheila.’

  They might reckon but they don’t know. They watch and wonder. A big lump like this could pack a punch.

  ‘You ought to go to the pox doctor.’

  Harry knows he mustn’t bristle. ‘They send a bloke home don’t they?’

  ‘Not any more they don’t.’

  ‘Well, that’s a shame.’

  If he has managed to deflect their curiosity, it can only be temporary. But for now they discuss the generalities of pox – symptoms, prophylactics, sure-fire cures – until the first of the barrows rumbles on the path. They bend again, scooping coal.

  At night the twenty-odd men in his hut escape communality by burrowing in their blankets. They dream aloud. He hears them laughing, bickering, whimpering, masturbating. He himself has no sexual feelings, regards it as an easily broken habit. His body feels old and misused and undeserving of the benevolent touch he remembers. To think of her is to wound himself, deliberately. Darkness and the embrace of blankets persuade him his misery is private. Briefly he is unaccountable to the daytime regime. He cries.

  He tries to imagine a comfortable future and can’t. The thought of returning to Australia is abhorrent: his small town gutted of anything valuable, the whole country tyrannised by patriotic committees. He couldn’t survive there. She couldn’t survive. It would be wrong to ask her. Britain is a possibility. He has certain rights. As a native speaker he could make his way, though as a country it doesn’t inspire him. One big poorhouse, according to George in his dotage. He will put it to her, if ever he gets the chance. She must decide. He suspects it will be France. Her natural choice, the safest, the one by which she ventures least. And he has to concede that even in ruins it has its attractions. As a foreigner he would enjoy a freedom from social expectations. As an ex-serviceman, a man who came to fight for France, he would be well-regarded. But he knows too that he would be hopelessly dependent on her – assuming she would have him.

  There are many reasons why she might not. There are waking reasons and sleeping reasons. In one particularly vexing dream he searches for his fictitious brother, or for the injured soldier – can’t be sure – within the tent wards of the hospital. He’s compelled by an urgent and guilty desire that he should be recovered, recognised, acknowledged. The beds are packed with crumpled men, each hiding in a sort of feeble terror beneath his sheet. They turn their faces from him, as if he means them harm. Nevertheless, he goes from bed to bed tugging and tearing at their linen. He wrestles with their tenacious hands, which seem to be identical to his own. There’s always the same scarring, a speckled thinning of the skin from burns he received as a child. He doesn’t think much of this until he’s confronted by a woman. He understands that it’s Colombe, though in disguise, wearing the face and the nun-like wimple of a nursing sister whom he’s noticed once or twice at the Red Cross canteen. ‘It is impossible,’ she says in clear English. ‘I’ve watched you. You don’t care for him.’

  Tried and condemned. She seems sad rather than reproachful. ‘Impossible,’ she says.

  He begins to protest. He tries to say his behaviour has not been characteristic, that he has not been himself.

  ‘You don’t care for him,’ she says.

  Such a short encounter, so uneventful! Yet when it comes back to him in the morning it’s a jab in the heart. He’s bewildered and irritated, ready to dismiss it
as a random shuffling of anxiety. Nevertheless, the dream-woman’s observation that he didn’t care for the soldier is undeniable. He resented his intrusion. He wished him far away. He wished him dead. Is this so reprehensible? He grows angry at the idea that in not caring for the soldier he failed himself. But who is there to quarrel with?

  Something of this spills over into his days – not anger, not hatred, but a feeble refinement: distaste. The initial pleasure of hearing his own language has vanished. He discovers that for him a little company goes a long way, and that after a day or two he doesn’t like the men with whom he works. He doesn’t like their grinning prurience or the smell of their bodies or their clannish lingo. It has always been an ordeal, this mucking in. And now he has lost all patience.

  He spirals into self-doubt. Is it true, then, that he’s incapable of fellow-feeling and compassion? That he doesn’t respect or trust his own kind? Indeed, himself? Is this what she saw?

  He blames the inertia of his thirties, the insular habits that accumulated like a white crust. And going back further, there’s the desolation of his household after Sammy died. There’s his willingness to be cosseted in his mother’s grief, so that he became a half-living memorial to his father. There’s anxiety and distrust at school, and distances maintained, and before that, Christopher Duncan. This name, uttered in the tumult of his head, still makes him flinch. He can’t re-experience his original longing. It’s dead. What remains is the referred pain of his own fear and unkindness. Bad thoughts. Debilitating thoughts. Follow them back far enough and he will arrive at a chimerical Eden, an infantile golden time when he supposedly was generous and affectionate, when he made friends easily and offended no one. This is where the worthy Harry Lambert is situated – interred, sealed deep in the crypt of decades past.

  He knows the danger of self-pity, the familiar paralysis. He’s sick with the waste of years, the running, the hiding, the withdrawals and desertions that began long before France. He sees no good in what he’s been. There’s an almost religious lunacy to his penitence. He must be saved and made new. He can’t do it alone. He must have an idol, an external promise of strength. This is how he conceives of Colombe Adele. An infinitely open heart! A last hope!

  Sometimes this seems excessive and absurd, but he’s too much in need to wholly deny it. When they tie him to the pole a second time he welcomes the pain as right and just, not because he has defied the army, but as a mad restitution for the suffering he’s caused Colombe.

  Right until the last hour of his sentence he doesn’t know what is to become of him. He wields a shovel, helping to resurface a road in a far corner of the camp. The lorries roll in and drop their ballast and he labours distractedly, constantly looking about for someone to come and rescue him. It’s possible he’s been forgotten, or that his papers have been lost. These things happen. But eventually, after they’ve quit for the day and begun the slow jog back to the prison, he sees Corporal Maitland from the bakery. It seems they’re prepared to have him back. The provost looks over the authorisation. ‘So you want Pokey Lambert?’ This is what the men have taken to calling him.

  ‘Not a question of want,’ says Maitland.

  ‘Bad luck. He’s all yours. One less for me to worry about.’

  Ten yards down the road, while the prisoners retreat in a bobbing mass, Maitland drops the pretence of hostility.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been, Lambert? Dipping your wick by all accounts.’

  Harry shrugs. How many times must he go through this? Fortunately the corporal doesn’t demand a reply. A bit of a joke, young Maitland, irrespective of the stripe. Harry tries to like him, against the grain. It’s empathy by rote. He’s determined to rebuild himself. Whether he ever sees Colombe again, he hankers after worthiness. He’s caring for Harold Lambert.

  They enter the bakery compound shortly before Parade, when the men are shambling back from the ablution shed or idling about the fronts of the huts. Their weary faces are mostly unknown. There are others he has almost ceased to know.

  ‘Lambert, you dirty bastard!’ someone shouts, a welcome of sorts, but without great surprise or emotion.

  Morning has him back in his old bakehouse. The men are new to the work, recently transferred in from other units. The section leader has only a few days’ experience more than the others, and is quite prepared to defer to Harry, who cajoles the battered oven and shifts the loaves to counteract the uneven heat. That the first batch comes out a uniform brown without a blackened corner or top-crust is considered miraculous. They ascribe his success to ‘tickling her right’. A shy and almost respectful ribbing. Testing the waters, he suspects. Or is he unduly touchy? In any event, his spirits are high, soaring on the aroma of hot white bread and his resolution to be worthy. He’s too busy to look forward or back. In cutting the dough, in paddling the portions into shape, there is a familiar peace.

  Yet by the time the dixies of stew come around at midday he has done a great deal of oblique thinking. He has a course of action. He must make a serious attempt at French. Attack it systematically. If he can get hold of a dictionary or a good grammar he’ll make it the centre of his day. While his hands are busy his mind can be elsewhere, learning to grasp those slippery half-formed sounds, the nasal vowels, the consonants that fall off the end of words. And if he can find a French speaker, someone with a little more knowledge than himself, or even the raw interest, the task will be easier. Inevitably he thinks of Bunter. Although he hasn’t returned to the bakery, he could be working somewhere else within Base Depot. But the new men have never heard of him. Herb Grinter thinks he’s in Belgium. Corporal Maitland, whom Harry finds eating alone on the steps of his bakehouse, spits a mouthful of gristle on the ground. ‘Fritz got him,’ he says.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘That’s the word.’

  ‘Official?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dead is dead. I heard it somewhere. If it wasn’t true they wouldn’t have said it.’

  While Harry doubts Maitland’s logic, and is therefore impregnable to sadness, he does accept that Bunter is out of reach. Does the corporal know anyone else who might speak French?

  ‘Only about ten million Frogs.’

  Very droll.

  The book proves easier. One of the men in his section has a little volume called When In France. He says he’s opened it maybe four or five times. Gave it up as a bad joke. It’s Harry’s for the taking. Another man, a former choir boy, asserts that French is just bastard Latin. Complete gibberish. A third offers to sing ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’.

  So much for linguists.

  It’s not long before Harry’s regarded as an odd bird. In his determination to learn the language he loses his sense of the ridiculous and becomes quite impervious to criticism. When the black labourers who come to remove the nightsoil are replaced by a contingent of German prisoners he sees an opportunity. Gaunt and hungry-looking, the enemy complete their work in regulation silence then spread out on the grass ten yards apart, no two men together, to wait for their guards. The Australians in the southernmost of the bakehouses keep a distracted eye on them, sometimes shouting derisive remarks or throwing ruined loaves. The Germans turn away or look down at their feet, never stooping to accept the bread. During smoko Harry wades out into their midst.

  ‘Any of you blokes know French?’ he asks, a considered and canny question, because if a man answers yes he must also have a knowledge of English. The Germans remain pointedly silent.

  thirty-six

  Talk of an enemy collapse is there throughout the summer and into autumn. The British newspapers that circulate around the huts celebrate great Allied victories. The prison cages swell with captured Germans. But while Harry recognises that the Allies are certainly creeping forward, a hill there, a village here, he won’t yet acknowledge a pattern, unless it is the usual pattern of vain striving, miles gained, miles lost, and lives
buried in the dirt. In spring it was the Germans who were advancing. Who’s to say there won’t be another reversal?

  Even so, their captain assures them the war is won. He says he sympathises with ‘those ardent chaps’ who have repeatedly applied for transfer to a fighting unit – fully twenty-five per cent of the bakery’s strength – but that for now he can’t accede to their wishes. And in the interim they shouldn’t devalue their work. In increasing output to new levels and continually improving quality, Field Bakeries South is helping to deliver the blow that will end the war.

  ‘Not long now, men. The end is in sight!’

  The ranks are accustomed to hearing the truth bent in the interests of morale. No one bothers to inquire after the mythical twenty-five per cent. But Harry can see that for some the promise of impending victory has a fairytale appeal, triggering suppressed thoughts of loved ones. He won’t allow himself to be seduced, especially as he’s aware the weeks have eroded his image of Colombe. Her face has disintegrated into elements, exaggerated features like a Punch drawing: tufted brows, eyes that are both shrewd and comic. Similarly her body. Sometimes he can picture her swollen ankles, less often, and with less assurance, a brown nipple and spreading areola. Sometimes this image is corrupted by memories of his dead mother. Yet his longing remains. And while he’s had no word, and is still denied leave, it’s a miserable and tenuous longing, far less defensible than his mess-mates’ desire for home. Of necessity he embraces the tedium of his ten-hour shift. He keeps his hands busy and occupies his mind with the utilitarian phrases of When In France.

  The words have a female cadence – words he can claim and own. Une poire pour la soif. A pear put aside for the time of thirst. Reserved. He discovers a wisdom in the French vernacular he has no trouble accepting. Conceptions of frugality, caution, foresight. Of making provision.