Myself When Young: Confessions

by Alec Waugh

Occasionally he had to answer an inquiry on the telephone, and this was the one excitement of his day. The telephone had always possessed a fascination for him, and whenever he heard the bell ring in the next room he would put down his pen and wait, listening for the sound of a chair pushed back, an opened door, and the short, “Mr Miller, you’re wanted on the ’phone.” It was always the same thing—an inquiry about space rate, or the date of a special issue, but he never failed to experience a tremor of excitement as he ran into the next room and took up the receiver.

Nothing unexpected ever happened; there was nothing to look forward to; each day was exactly like the one that had gone before; he did not, indeed, see how anything could ever happen now. He would remain in that office for the rest of his life. In the end he might become manager of a department. At the age of forty he might have a large enough salary to be able to think of marriage. Forty! How often had they agreed in the mess that love was the privilege of the young. As far as he could see, everyone else was in the same boat. He used to go round occasionally to the long bar at the Troc: a melancholy sight. In 1917 it had been full of young officers, eager, light-hearted, home on leave with pay in their pockets and in their hearts a reckless determination to make the most of what little time was left them. The same fellows were there now, young men in mufti, leaning across the bar sipping their cocktails, raising their glasses to the light, exchanging their “cheeriohs.” But the lightheartedness had left them; their faces were set in lines of sullen discontent; they would stand and talk together of France and their experiences there. The unpleasant memories had been effaced. Already they had forgotten. They were unhappy in the present; they remembered they had been happy in the past.

And, with a vague nostalgia, Miller appreciated that in France, in spite of the danger and discomfort, there had been always something to look forward to. There had been the mail, a relief, the taking over of a new bit of line, a continual change, and there had been leave—how wonderful that had been, to count the days to one’s leave, to say to one’s self: “in twenty-three days’ time I shall be in London”; there was nothing like that now. And peace: how often he had talked of it, of all the things he would do, après la guerre; the future had seemed to him boundless then with opportunities. He had looked forward with a happy confidence to the days of routine and quiet work. He had asked nothing more than that—the resumption of the ordered ways.

He remembered, too, in what spirit he had read three years earlier a novel by Zola called The Soil. He had seen a copy at the railway bookstall at Boulogne with “Suppressed English Edition” printed in thick black lettering across the yellow cover. He was on his way back from leave and he had hoped that the book would help him to pass agreeably the long journey to Baupaume. But he had found it heavy even in its obscenity, and he had discarded it for the light suggestion of Fantasia and Le Rire. Later, however, during the nights of wakefulness in a lonely post, he had returned, for want of anything else to read, to Zola, and he had soon found to his surprise that, instead of turning the pages quickly with prurient fingers in search of the flavoured passage, he was reading the book carefully, word by word, letting it pass slowly before his eyes—a savage spectacle of human life held captive to the soil, of men and women whose actions and desires were controlled by their allegiance to it, and of that fierce ferment of deceit, greed, falsehood, wantonness that the soil turned in its own way to its own use.

It had seemed strange to him, though, that Jean, an old soldier, should be prepared, even after so much adversity, to rejoin the army. It was easy to forget; memory, concerned with the general proportions of a picture, selected what it chose; Miller knew that, but could anyone, he had asked himself, forget the fatigue of a long march, the chill of nightfall in the open, the heartache of separation, the fields of blood and pain. And, putting the book down on the table, he had walked to the head of his dug-out steps and looked out over the long stretch of mangled country. Himself, he never could forget.

But that had been three years earlier, under the flicker of a Verey light, within the range of guns. And now, sitting at a desk with a pile of press-cuttings before him, and the clatter of typewriters beating on his ear, he felt prepared to welcome any change, however violent. If only something would happen. That evening as he walked down Kingsway to Holborn station the newsboys were shouting tidings of another war; across the placards a huge note of interrogation followed the word Berlin. Was it then to begin again—the noise, the cruelty, the carnage? For a moment there passed before his eyes a picture of Passendael as he had last seen it in the October rains, the dead tilted across the lips of shell holes. Then his thoughts returned to the present and its more urgent trouble, the monotony of routine; the type-writers; the proofs; the copy. “Allies to march to Berlin! Paper! Ultimatum to Germany! Paper!” The words were flung out into the mild spring air and the sound floated heedlessly down Kingsway over the heads of the workers, old and young, who were hurrying towards their homes, with faces set in hard lines of dull, sullen resentment. “Start of a New War! Paper!” If only something new would happen. “Ultimatum to Germany! Paper! Allies—Berlin—Paper!” And Evan Miller, in his heart of hearts, hoped that it was true.

That is the story as I wrote it. But life from its vast repertoire can produce always when it chooses, a climax far more complete than any of our contrivance. Sometimes, impatient with our fumbling, it takes the pen from us and writes.

Three weeks later a trade dispute brought England nearer to revolution than it had been for a hundred years. The regular reserve was recalled to the colours and Evan Miller found himself at Shorncliffe reporting at orderly room his existence and unimportance; curiously easy, he would discover, the re-adoption, after an absence of two years, of the formalities of military life; curious, too, how stabilising became, after the casual nature of town engagements, the fixed routine of the parade-ground and the mess. But that would be personal and incidental. The significance, the universally applicable significance of that six weeks’ return to uniform would lie in the chance discovery in the pocket of an old tunic of a piece of paper, placed there hurriedly and forgotten, two years before. There would be nothing romantic about that piece of paper. A memo, from battalion dated the 17th of February 1919. “Please note,” it said, “that you were passed fit for active service by the Medical Board at Dover, the 3rd of December 1918.” Formal enough: to anyone but himself, meaningless enough. The sort of thing with which a dug-out would have become quickly littered had he not possessed a servant. But its discovery would be, for him, that inevitable, that unpremeditated moment, at which every story-teller is aiming and so rarely reaching. He would stand in the centre of the room, the piece of paper in his hand, and before his eyes, and before his brain, the details of the circumstances under which he had last seen it.

In the early spring of 1919 a couple of months’ leave had been granted to all regular officers, and a very great number of them had taken advantage of that leave to file their application for transference to the reserve of officers. It was on the last morning before his leave that he had found waiting for him in the ante-room that memo. from battalion correcting a mistake he had made in his application for leave. He had laughed gaily, confidently. They could send their memos. if they liked, he had told himself. To-morrow he would be in London, and if, during two months, he could achieve no compromise with the Whitehall mandarins he had no right to call himself a soldier. And he pushed the note away into his pocket.

The recovered memory of that gesture of careless confidence would be a mirror in which he could see reflected the significance of the last two years. He would see himself two years earlier, eager and exuberant, tired of army life, anxious for a return to freedom, proudly assured of his capacity to subdue the future. He would remember how his one idea in those days had been to rush away from camp. For the sake of eleven hours in town he had caught a five o’clock train from Grantham on Sunday morning and had not got back to bed till three o’clock. The journey had cost him twenty-seven shillings. His first question on joining a new unit had been, “What chance of leave?” No matter how far from town, how long, how expensive, how uncomfortable the journey—he had been prepared to make it: anything to get back to civil life. And he would see himself now in this aftermath of turmoil, indifferent, passive, dumbly satisfied. He had hardly considered the question of leave. It would cost him over a pound to get to town; it wasn’t worth it. There would be very little for him to do when he got there. A theatre, a dance, a dinner. It was pleasanter on the whole to sit and read Blackwood’s in the mess and play bridge and walk across the cliffs to Folkestone. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to do. He was well enough where he was. The old zest for life had gone, pilfered from him by two years of frustration and disappointment and foiled endeavour. And the realisation of it would be brought to him by the discovery of a crumpled memo., a thing intrinsically worthless, but the focus, the rallying-point of much hard circumstance.