FROM AWAY, TOWARDS. June 1940

FROM AWAY, TOWARDS. June 1940 - October 1945. Departure, Journey, Absence and Return. Departure June 1940 Through the open door of this army hut, only three yards away from where I lie on this straw palliasse, three red poppies wave wildly, and in a mad world semaphore sanity from a bank of simple grass. They leap, tilt and argue with the wind in a lovely wild but tethered liberty. So do I here, and tether my own little bit of tethered liberty to them, to the shape of that hill, to the friendly phantom of Corfe Castle in its milk of mist, and to you. Sanity.Everything goes into the memory, visually, so easily, but somewhat more hesitantly into pencilled words. Poor things, they are trying to perform some form of partial marriage for me - to you, to what I see. Having been pulled up by the roots and taken from home, is it possible to put down others so quickly in the barren misery of absence, in this military opposite of living? But there they are -three red poppies, the river light, Corfe Castle delicious in its mist. It is almost with a sense of guilt and betrayal that any kind of pleasure grows. Yesterday I was with you. Yesterday I said goodbye to you, to eyes as wet as the pouring rain outside. Today I am without you. It’s so simple, so astonishing. Today is only one day after yesterday. How can there therefore be so much difference? Yesterday so much rain, today a huge wet sun. And this gorgeous sun blinks from every particle of glittering dew, and yet it is not dew. It is the knowledge of those unsayable goodbyes, the memory-ghost of those wet unforgettable eyes, the bald beginning of war. The sun will dry up the dew but not the sense of banishment, not the sense of fear that goes with it. In the pastoral off-duty evening, all the day’s official military waste vanishes in the swagger and the beauty of a single gull. The army’s mad misery fights a losing battle with the pleasures of the day the eye retains - the same gull’s flight, one cloud’s hard edge of brilliant light, the wicked grace of the AA gun barrels swinging in symmetry from right to left in drill, the long hundred yards of shadow behind a three-foot fencing post, the kinetic geometry of moving circles swallows make, and the memory, the memory of your few shoulder-freckles shaped like the small shadows under these trees at noon, and the lark, ah! damn the lark for spilling downward its thrilling climbing song. I cannot cope. The regimental dog (rescued, and brought with them all the way from Dunkirk) teaches us ironically things about liberty and freedom all day long. He runs so freely in and out of our fixed and drilling ranks - the essence of it. Evening leave, and walking back from town, just before regaining camp, stood still and listened to the quiet sounds of Dorset nibbling at the silent rind of night. The stars were the brilliant fragments of our short marriage, the night the sadness over all. The cold iron misery of the local church bell chilled all the remembering warmth to stone. Then, went past the guard into this other military world. 1 Saluted to the right, to the left, to the front, for two hours this morning, and yesterday, and it seems all mornings, for weeks. Before that, other drill. Learnt how to left turn and right turn. There is only shame and absurdity in standing in a field with a hand to the forehead counting three before one takes it down. But you can stomach such drill if it's before breakfast. The eye can leap to the early light, and the mind can cool its fretting and rebellion in the dove-grey clouds left over from the dawn. Before breakfast too, you are allowed those few marvellous moments of precious personal privacy in the camp latrines. Round their almost obscene centre centres so much. They are where, for a moment, tethered like those poppies, a personal life can still wave, even in the concentrated perfumes of this military air. Today it has been all day “ How like a winter hath my absence been.” Unbelievable how the cold precision of the sonnets, the deliberate absence of lyricism in them, should have all the more power to prick the eyes to tears, without emotional fuss, with such complete accuracy. All day today, gun practice for the beginner-gunner. Waiting endlessly sitting in the so-called operations room, reporting things occasionally, and yet still managing, surreptitiously, to read King Lear between, and sometimes even during, simulated operations. Plane bearing 115. Searchlights up. Formation approaching, bearing 120. Then Lear: ‘Oh how this mother wells up toward my heart. Hysterica passio, down thou climbing sorrow, thy element's below.’ Oh, yes, and so cry I to what continuously climbs in mine. I think they sense they have to harden me, and I’ve no doubt that they are absolutely right. I am now breech number on Number Three gun, the terrified master of a mass of shining steel. At a touch, dear God, you used to yield, and I melted too. Now these damned great guns explode, lurch, recoil and nearly lift me off my feet. Cookhouse fatigue, before lunch, in glorious weather. Heavenly. Almost a sack of potatoes to peel, sitting in the sun. A pleasant, peaceful job. And afterwards, on one side, there are piles of dirty shapeless peelings, but on the other are fine shining mess-tins full of small, bald, decapitated heads, bright, fresh, aristocratic, clean, creamy ovoids, and after lunch, the way the hungry grab and scuffle for a bit of extra food is quite a shock. Some of us hover round near the not quite empty mess tins after each meal like the old men we used to see hanging round the restaurant dustbins in the back streets of Piccadilly. They have moved the whole regiment, after training, down here on the Cornish coast. Lovely. I can see the sea from here. It’s calm, with many delicate edges, with a gentle inward flow folding over the gentle backward ebb, and there’s a gentle, modest burst of small spray backwards off every visible rock. Hardly any colour. It all seems drawn in black and white. The high clouds are gentle and delicate too, like small, neat, laundered heaps of linen in the sky. Washed, ironed, starched, set out to dry. It’s all too ironically tidy while everything else is torn to bits. 2 Not so ironic. There’s a field of rye next to the gunsite. The wind is sending vast excited shoals of silver fish across its green tide, but there’s a dark hem of poppies all round the headland, blood at the gills. Fear. On spotting duty today, and watched a hawk through the heightfinder. It held its hover, without shifting, for minutes on end. Magnificent. Tony should also have joined the Ack Ack. It gives endless opportunities for unofficial birdwatching through the strongest of Barr and Stroud magnifications. Off duty in the evening reading. Looking up, startled to find, in the only window of the Nissen hut, the outside sky grow gradually scarlet and in the end the window and the whole hut and myself became just this violent square of dark scarlet light disembodied from the hut. Never been alone under a tin helmet before. Alone, yes, but not under a tin helmet. Was on sentry duty today, and, strangely, the helmet didn’t seem to interfere with a mind that simply romped about with the sun and wind, and romped again and again up in the sky along long chains, Christmas paper chains of gaily coloured clouds, and slid along and up and down the horizon’s hills as if on a scenic railway. In the middle of the guilt I suddenly felt, (because you weren’t there), a JU 88 suddenly appeared out of nowhere from these lovely clouds, like a symbol of that guilt, and tried to bomb, presumably, Saltash Bridge. It missed by miles, and then, far too quickly even for the Battery to shoot, it disappeared into those same gaily coloured clouds. Is there an alternative to accepting this bloody war? Should one throw one’s cowardice to the winds and opt to play the passionate and deliberate Conscientious Objector? Has one that sort of conscience? I don’t think I have. Wouldn’t it, perhaps, be reading a world lesson in terms of one minute and pretty paltry self? Or, in our case, two minute and pretty paltry selves? I think, on balance, I would wish to defend ALL individual selves first and before even that the freedom of every individual self to freely speak his mind, to have a personal life, though I would hate to pay the full price for it. I think I accept the necessity for this war. To be an objective acceptor. Is that better or worse than a conscientious objector? Or is that being too pliant? Perhaps, yes, we all need both. Wonderful day, in summer, and in war. And yet to be allowed to smell the pollen-laden air so sweetly crammed into the column of space between the earth and those white clouds. To listen to this marvellous summer murmur. To watch the whole thing shift its slow, lovely drift northwards from the south, with all this warmth and scent and murmur in its mouth.

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