A Spell of Swallows Read online

  ‘Might be,’ said Ashe, ‘Might not. If there’s any work about, I might stay.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be work all right.’ The man leaned his beefy folded forearms on the bar. One of them bore a mermaid tattoo. Strong man—Ashe wondered how long it would be before he made a comment.

  ‘Perhaps you could give me a few tips.’

  ‘I dare say I could . . .’ The implication was that this depended on several things. ‘Mind if I ask you a question?’

  Ashe nodded.

  ‘Nothing rude, but what happened to you?’

  MESOPOTAMIA, 1916

  They do nothing but complain. I can hear them now, whining and grumbling, pretending it’s a bit of a joke, that they’re Tommies and this is what’s expected of them, but I don’t think it’s funny. What did they expect for Christ’s sake—clean sheets, home comforts, a hot dinner on the table? They’re all scared shitless, of course, that’s why they’re pissing in the wind: it’s a hell of a lot easier to focus on food and filth than on having your brains blown out by the Infidel.

  You won’t catch me complaining. I like it here. Don’t get me wrong, I hate dirt more than most people, had enough of it to last me a lifetime, but there’s nothing I miss about Civvy Street, or England—and my view of ‘home’ is none too rosy, either. What you haven’t had, you don’t miss. My whole life so far’s been a training in opportunism and Basra’s an opportunist’s heaven. Every single bloke here, officers and men, is after something, and if you can provide even a little bit of what it is they’re after you’ll be quids in. Not that I ever ask for payment. It’ll come round, given time. And even if it doesn’t, there’ll be an opportunity to take it and no questions asked, because they know you’re owed. With the officers, a bit of an obligation goes a long way, they like to pay up. They probably call it honour, but it’s just they don’t like owing anything to a member of the lower orders.

  My three are pretty typical. Lieutenants Cornwall and Morrish, and Captain Jarvis, Queen’s Own. He’s the senior officer, the boss, I don’t do for the others till I’ve done him. Does justice to the uniform, I’ll say that: long legs, straight back, beer-bottle shoulders—time spent on his turnout is never wasted: ‘Ashe,’ he says, ‘appearances are important and don’t let anyone tell you different.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ I say. ‘Johnny Turk’ll see his own reflection in these buttons. And if he scares himself half as much as he scares the rest of us we won’t see him for dust.’

  From time to time I play the colourful character; they love it. Jarvis isn’t daft—he knows there’s a bit of play-acting going on, but not how much. The trick is to flatter people by stealth, to feed them a few clues so they think they’ve arrived at some great insight all on their own, whereas it’s only what you allow them and want them to know and not a fraction more. He thinks he knows me, but he doesn’t. Nobody does.

  He’s an educated man, and a cultured one, I’ll give him that. Taken the worst that public school and Sandhurst could throw at him and still come out halfway decent. When he found out I like to read he started lending me books. They don’t like this climate, the pages get all spotted with mould if you’re not careful, but if you rub the covers with a bit of dubbin you can keep them looking all right on the outside.

  ‘Ashe, you’re one of the few people I don’t mind lending books to,’ he said. ‘They come back quickly and looking better than when they left.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘I should have been a librarian, sir.’ That made him laugh.

  I think he’s a bit embarrassed at how well we get on. He’s not one to pull rank, likes to think he can get along with anyone, but in the army the leaders of men are supposed to be out in front and several rungs up the social ladder. I accept that, hierarchy’s fine with me. Gives you something to work with. So Jarvis’s attempts to get matey don’t work with me. I never drop a ‘sir’ and I never take advantage. I keep that gap in place. It’s more fun that way.

  Well. I say fun—when there’s sweet Fanny Adams to do, you have to make your own amusement. And the whole army—regulars, volunteers, Sikhs, top brass, cavalry, infantry, sappers, grafters and idlers—are hanging about in Basra waiting for the Call to Arms. No one’s got any idea what that will involve when it does come. I mean there’s not likely to be some glorious charge, we don’t know what we’re dealing with, and the terrain, from what we can tell, is pretty fair old hell. The Buddhoos (our name for the Bedouin) are at the gate, galloping about and firing the odd shot, showing off while they decide whose side they’d most like to be on. Perfectly understandable—we’re in their country and when the show’s over they’ll naturally want to be alongside the top dogs.

  At any rate, Jarvis and I and the other two are pretty comfortable in one of the requisitioned houses. Enough to eat, a roof over our heads, and only the number of creatures you’d expect at this latitude: mosquitoes, lizards, the odd little snake. That’s not counting the flies, there are millions of them. Anything that stays still, they settle on, especially if it’s dead. If you live on a swamp, you have to expect them. Like the Buddhoos, we’re on their territory.

  Jarvis comes back from company HQ this morning relaying the master plan of some bright spark.

  ‘A competition, Ashe,’ he says. ‘First prize to the man who catches most flies over the next week.’

  I can’t tell if he’s joking, so I stay deadpan. ‘Sir.’

  ‘You have to have the corpses to prove it. To which end—’ He produces a fly-swatter and a length of fly-paper, but he’s still straight-faced. ‘The tools for the job.’

  ‘Thank you sir,’ I say, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He hands them over. ‘For the honour of the regiment, Ashe.’

  ‘Sir!’ I snap to attention.

  It turns out it’s not a joke. The idea is to stop men getting used to the little buggers and eating too much flyblown food—to encourage them to lay about them with the swat instead. But do they think that flies have a nine-month gestation period or something? For every one of the bastards that winds up on our fly-paper, there has to be another thousand hatching out every five seconds and getting on with the job.

  Still, a competition is a competition and there’s more than one way to play it. It turns out the prize is a bottle of rum. A lot of people might be desperate for that, but not me; I scarcely drink, and Jarvis and co have plenty of booze. So I set up a fly trap with an empty pilchard tin, grow enough bacteria to start a farm, and when it’s seething with them I pop a sieve over the top, slip out the tin and get on with catching the next crop while the first ones die a lingering death. Makes me retch, but it works a treat.

  After only one day I’m selling corpses by the handful, for cash. Everyone’s got the idea that cash is useless. But when everyone has an idea, that’s the moment to buy cheap as the market traders say.

  ‘Come on then,’ I say, raking in the lolly, ‘I’ll take it off your hands, you never know.’

  There’s an amazing number of simpletons about in the British Army. Or maybe it’s one of the qualifications, a requirement laid down in Queen’s Regulations as per:

  Must be easily led

  Must not be critical of leaders

  Must grouse about conditions

  Must not grouse about hail of bullets . . .

  These men bellyache about everything from hard tack to mosquitoes, but line them up behind some smoothy-chops from officer training and they’ll follow him to hell and back, no questions asked. Some chap who’s practically in tears about the gharri horses in the street will boast of slitting open another human being, liver and lights, and stepping on his head to get to the next one.

  I’m on my way out for a bit of a forage. I can cook, and the army cooks let me work round them as long as I don’t get in the way. It’s worth it, to provide my little gang with something a bit different, and a damn sight nicer, though I say it myself.

  I have to stop for a second when I step outside. The heat’s solid, a smack i
n the face, like being too close when you open the oven door. Before, when I heard the phrase ‘break out in a sweat’ I didn’t know what it meant. Now though—every last pore opens its little gasping mouth and the sweat runs down all over me, It’s like losing a skin. And the stink! It made me gag to begin with, but now I’m used to it it’s like the character of the place—the smell of adventure. Do or be done. The blokes from India say it’s nothing to Calcutta but I take that with a pinch of salt. Another saying of the British fighting man: It is not half as rough as the last place.

  Basra. See it on a postcard and it’s the mysterious East; the gateway to Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet; land of the Bible as they keep telling us (I never read it before but since we’ve been here I’ve taken a look at the regulation issue for research purposes). Estuary’s called the Shatt-el-Arab—you can guess what the men do with that name. The only motor vehicles here are ours and not many of those; the rest of the traffic is carts and wagons and gharris, donkeys and horses, all in a terrible state. The way they treat their animals! Let’s just say they don’t share the British attitude to God’s creatures. I’m not sentimental about animals: this is just plain wasteful. If a donkey’s your means of transport, your livelihood, surely it makes economic sense to feed it from time to time, and not flog it to within an inch of its life when it’s already carrying five times its own bodyweight in temperatures like a blast furnace? But what do I know, they have their ways. There are a few dogs and cats, feral, not pets. All the dogs, which I call Mr Dog, look the same: pointed face and curly tail, always on the lookout. They’re scavengers, but whoever gets the loot first guards it tooth and nail. You come across them dead in the gutter, all the time, torn apart by others of their kind. Dog eat dog. More food for the flies.

  Did I say gutter? It was just an expression; there are no gutters where I’m going, through the back streets to the soukh. Everything, I mean everything, just runs down the middle of the street. You hop over or wade through; the little kids paddle in it and the dogs drink—pardon me, I get this gagging reflex when I think about it. Their standards of hygiene do leave a lot to be desired. Perhaps that’s why the people don’t age well: the drains and the climate. They’re handsome to begin with, the children are the best-looking crooks you ever saw, and the women, you can imagine. But somewhere halfway along they start losing teeth and hair and gaining wrinkles, their hands turn into chicken-claws and in no time at all they’re ugly as sin.

  We’re similar in one way, them and me. We’re all opportunists. An Arab will say anything to get the result he wants at that precise moment. Whatever he thinks you want to hear, he’ll say it, and at the time he’ll mean every word. He’s completely self-interested. Once you appreciate that, you can deal with him. You just have to be more self-interested than him. The phrase ‘gentleman’s agreement’ doesn’t exist in Arabic. A lot of the Tommies still think because our host’s biddable, that means he’ll do your bidding and come back. Dear, oh dear . . . These are the marsh Arabs, of course. Jarvis says the nomads out in the desert, the Buddhoos, are a very different kettle of fish, code of honour, sacred laws of hospitality, loyalty and so on. I don’t know how he squares that with all the sniping that goes on around the edge of this city every evening. They’re superb horsemen and don’t they know it! Charging up and down waving their fire-pieces, just so they can turn and stop on a sixpence. Nothing the matter with those horses, dripping with silver and silk, fed on Turkish delight and washed in asses’ milk I shouldn’t wonder.

  Another thing, the Arab doesn’t like to be known. He doesn’t want to be read, or understood, he wants everything on his terms and if that means duplicity, what we’d call treachery, fine. It’s the one thing about him I can understand—I don’t like to be known either. Keep something back, and you hold the cards.

  From where I am now you get a view down to the river. Across the end of the alleyway it’s like a magic lantern show with the little boats going to and fro—the canoe-shaped ones, bellums they’re called, and the bigger ones that are like gondolas, with swan-necks, the mashoofs. Pretty as a picture, with the palms on the far bank . . .

  I stop to admire and the moment I do there’s a little hand like a feather on my trouser pocket and I catch it, without even looking down, and nip the soft skin between my fingernails. He doesn’t even yelp, just runs away like a shadow. It’s all part of the game.

  I can hear the noise, now, getting louder, and in a few minutes I come into the market place. It’s huge, with dust rising from it like a smoking cauldron. There must be a hundred stalls and a thousand people. On the far side, come in from the desert, the Buddhoos sit on rugs with their camels and horses behind them, selling dates, and fruit, and carvings and jewellery. The tack on those horses alone would fetch a fortune in Bond Street, and the horses themselves—beautiful. As I walk over, the men watch me through their pipe smoke. Which of them was firing at us last night, I wonder? We don’t trust each other, but then I don’t trust anyone. Best way to be.

  That evening I make them goat stew with some dates and onions and rice, and then yoghurt with honey.

  ‘Ashe,’ says Jarvis, ‘you’re a treasure.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The other two laugh, and Mellish says: ‘And you’re not going to give away your secrets!’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Later on they go to the officers’ mess in one of the big houses by the river, and I lie on the roof and look at the stars. All around the city’s seething but up here you can lose yourself. As it happens there’s a thin crescent moon like a scimitar up there.

  I never felt more peaceful.

  Chapter Two

  The room at the Waggoner’s was comfortable, and Ashe slept well. The next morning he got up early, washed, and shaved carefully. One of several advantages about the bad side of his face was that no hair grew there; which saved time, but you had to be careful, when going round the edge of the raised scar tissue, not to inflict painful nicks.

  He dressed smartly (having scrubbed his shirt collar and cuffs the night before) and went down to breakfast feeling crisp and ready for anything. The girl who served him his bacon and eggs must have been primed by the landlord what to expect; Ashe could detect no blenching, or else she managed to conceal it by scarcely looking at him at all. As he was drinking his second cup of tea the landlord himself came in, ostensibly to stocktake behind the bar, but actually to find out a bit more about his only guest.

  ‘Off out looking for work then?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘As I say—the forge, the farms, the station. All worth a try.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Ashe wondered how he’d been spoken of in the bar last night after he’d gone up. He’d kept his answers as sparing as was consistent with politeness, but there would have been plenty of speculation in a little place like this. The landlord asked, casually:

  ‘Be staying another night, you reckon?’

  ‘I expect so.’ Ashe glanced around. ‘If there’s room.’

  The landlord chortled. ‘Very humorous! I think we can fit you in.’

  Shortly after that Ashe went out, reflecting as he did so that the sooner he found a room of his own, the better.

  Though it was no longer a new experience, Saxon never failed to be delighted by the first copy of a poetry collection. The freshness of the paper, its texture and smell—the purity of it all. The poems themselves were still at this stage pristine; they bore the fingerprints (both literal and metaphorical) of no one but himself, the printer, and his editor, George Lownes. If he could be said to have ‘a readership’, Saxon was ambivalent about it. He quite liked the minor celebrity that his writing afforded him, but only from the privacy of his own study: he shrank from the hurly-burly of the open market. After all, his ‘readers’ that George spoke about, who were they? Even in the rarefied literary world in which Saxon operated there were bound to be those who didn’t care for his work, who found it difficult or obscure or w
ho (worst of all) took refuge from their own ignorance by laughing at it. The mere thought of public ridicule horrified him. Saxon took himself seriously, as both priest and poet, and expected others to do the same.

  He had unwrapped the little parcel at the breakfast table—Vivien had overslept—but now, almost furtively, he put it back in its brown paper and headed for his study to relish the moment in private and at leisure.

  ‘Saxon! Is that what I think it is? Is it the book?’

  She came running down the stairs, pulling on one of her terrible old cardigans, the brown one with pink felt flowers appliquéd over the holes. Saxon felt the usual pang of despairing tenderness. How could a woman so passionate, so intuitive and alluring when naked between the sheets be so completely lacking in style or self-respect when conducting her normal life fully clothed? It was a mystery to him, but one that he acknowledged lent something to their marriage since her other self was known only to him.

  ‘Let me see!’

  He held the book out to her and she took it almost reverently, turning it over in her hands, flipping back the dustjacket to admire the binding, glancing at the publisher’s encomium, riffling the pages as if the book itself, and not its contents, were the thing to be approved and admired. For Saxon, her reaction was the right one at this early stage—it hadn’t taken her long to realise that the actual reading of the poems must come later, when he himself had done so, several times. He appreciated his wife’s quick sensibilities in these matters.

  ‘It looks so elegant,’ she said, handing it back. ‘But have they done you justice? Are you pleased?’

  ‘I am. Of course I need to . . . I shall write to George when I’ve looked through the book.’

  ‘And reminded yourself what a wonderful writer you are!’

  He knew the last thing she intended was to allude to the hint of vanity in his nature, but unfortunately that was the effect. ‘Scarcely,’ he muttered.