The Naked Island | Page 9

of Five-bob-a-day butchers" from a
pacifist Labour member who had never seen military service of any

kind (and conse quently was made a high-ranking member of the
wartime Labour Cabinet). wound imaginary elevating gear: levelled
imaginary clinometres: hunched imaginary shells into imaginary
breeches taking care (by clenching one's fist) that one's fingers were not
amputated by the slamming of imaginary breech blocks. All this we
had done with the most admirable composure, although I had never
been good at this playing at soldiers.
Then we were ordered by the "gun s" officer to drag our imaginary gun
with imaginary dragropes. Still our composure was beyond re proof.
Next we were ordered to coil our imaginary dragropes, hang them on
the front of the imaginary gun shield, hook up our non existent gun and
ammunition limber to our non-existent tractor and leap aboard with
drilled precision onto the non-existent tractor's non-existent seats.
All this we did with the external composure and ardour of lunatics
playing their demented games. Six men in the middle of an empty
parade ground stood resting their bottoms on nothing as if con vinced
that they were seated in a 30-hundredweight truck, to which was
attached a Mark IV eighteen-pounder and its limber not a trace of
derision on any one face.
Then it happened. The officer, obsessed with the excitement of this
exhilarating manoeuvre, screamed at us; "Sit at attention there. When
you mount your tractor you sit at attention!" and up shot my eye brow.
In that non-existent truck with its six petrified passengers, the only
thing that moved was my eyebrow and immediately I was on a charge.
Same old thing. Dumb insolence. I resolved thencefor ward to keep the
offending feature horizontal.
And having thus acquired both a knowledge of gun drill and a sense of
discipline, I was transferred into Battery Headquarters to learn the more
precise art of ranging the guns onto their targets.
I moved into a galvanized iron hut which, in those winter months, was
so freezing at night that its occupants fairly refrigerated. Re quests for
extra blankets were met with the restatement of a sum mertime
regulation, which limited blanket issues to three. Our quar termaster

sergeant devoted his entire life to the cause of issuing nothing if
possible and as little as he decently could if it were not Consequently,
we got no extra bedding from him and everyone retired to sleep at
nights dressed in every single article of his clothing issue, not
excluding the two pairs of obscene-looking long wool len underpants.

I soon came to like most of the men in the hut. They were an assorted
bunch, certainly, but likable. Four of them had enlisted together (with
yet a fifth, who, being a sergeant, dwelt elsewhere) from an accountants
firm Piddington, Magee, Shackle, Robinson. Of them only Piddington
was to survive. Magee and Robinson died in Thailand on the Japanese
railway, Shackle died on the Sandakan March in Borneo. Then there
were the two Icetons Johnny and Bluey, who was called Bluey, in the
Australian fashion, because he had red hair. They had not known each
other before their Army days and had met in the regiment quite by
chance. They became inseparable friends. Johnny was to be killed at
Parit Sulong: Bluey lost an arm in an action the day before,
Wimpey, who slept opposite me, was small and quiet and never washed.
Ponchard, his mate, was seldom in camp, being more or less
permanently A.W.O.L. This tendency he was unable to curb even in
Thailand when in 1943 I saw him wandering in the jungle, apparently
mad and miles from his own camp.
Ronnie Welsh, stocky, dark-haired, played a delightful game of football
and in battle proved that he had no fear and had never known it. He was
a bombardier and a man whom I respected whole heartedly His fellow
bombardier, Rosenberg (a solicitor of nearly forty), was a pleasant soul
with a passion for slide-rule computa tionswhich took him hours and
for shaving with a cut-throat razor and no mirror which he did in a
matter of seconds. He, too, died in Thailand.
Hugh Moore, who had been at the university with me, was to share in
many of the unpleasant events which subsequently befell me, Clif t,
though a gunnery officer of the 1914 war and the only man in the
regiment who combined a fluent knowledge of the Malayan language

with a high speed on the morse key, was to languish as a gunner (his
talents quite wasted) for the duration.
These were the men whose company I was to share for the next few
months. They were friendly and generous to an incredible de gree.
There were, of course, others whose names now escape me others, like