African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [29]
Soon, he poured himself another brandy, and another–carefully, as usual–and then he was talking about his war, not the Bush War, but the Second World War, how he was in the Repulse when it was sunk, and then the fighting in the Mediterranean. His tone changed. I recognized it. What he wanted to tell me was terrible, but he wasn’t going to make much of it. How could he? He had been trained not to.
‘Did I ever tell you about the Repulse?’
‘You wouldn’t talk about it.’
‘Wouldn’t I? That’s funny. I think about it all a good bit.’
And now that was it, we were off, never mind about the Affs and the ‘terrs’, the Bush War and the inglorious Brits. This is what he wanted to talk about. His war.
‘I was down at the bottom of the ship. That’s where I was when the Jap bombs hit. We knew there were only a few minutes before the ship went down. The water was pouring in…did you know the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were supposed to be unsinkable?’
‘Yes, like the Titanic.’
‘Yes. Funny, the way we go on believing…I was standing at the bottom of the companionway, while the men climbed up past me…the stairs were already perpendicular. I just stood there. Someone said to me, “Aren’t you going to go up, Tayler? You’d better get a move on.” I went up those stairs like a monkey, and I walked down the slanting deck straight into the sea and I swam away as fast as I could. Lucky for me I’m a good swimmer. Some of the chaps couldn’t swim fast enough. We were in the water for hours. It was full of oil and rubbish from the ship and dead men floating. I trod water. I used as little energy as I could and I kept my nose and mouth above the oil. Then they came to pick us up out of the water. They said there were sharks but I couldn’t see any. They were probably keeping clear of the oil too. Wouldn’t want to be a shark in that mess.’
‘Well, that wasn’t very jolly, was it,’ I said, falling from long practice into the mode, or tone.
‘No,’ he said, looking carefully at me to see what I was saying. ‘No. A lot of my friends were drowned, you see.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was just luck it wasn’t me. If that chap hadn’t said, you’d better get a move on, Tayler…’
‘Yes. And then?’
‘Oh, and then they patched me up and rehabilitated me. In Ceylon, that was. They gave us a good time in Ceylon. So I believe. I met someone not long ago, and he said, They gave us a good time in Ceylon. I pretended I could remember, but I couldn’t. Ceylon is a blank. I was there for weeks. It’s a total blank. It really is a funny thing what we remember…you saying things…I’ve been thinking hard the last few days…and then after Ceylon was the Med.’
‘And you were there quite a time.’
‘Yes, the Aurora. A good ship, that. A good lot of chaps.’
‘And there was that gunfire and you got very deaf.’
‘That was nothing, being deaf I mean. They gave me an operation, and then they gave me this hearing-aid. It’s a miracle, this hearing-aid. Sometimes I forget I was ever deaf…’
A long silence. The fire burned in the wall, and the dogs lay stretched out, firelight moving on their soft fur.
‘No,’ said Harry. ‘That wasn’t the point, you see…’ A pause. ‘It wasn’t till the Bush War I understood something about myself. I suddenly understood I had been numbed for years and years. Only just the other day I said to myself, you’ve spent the best part of your life numbed. Frozen…’ A pause. ‘That wasn’t a very nice thing, suddenly knowing that.’
‘What made you understand, then? Was it something that happened in the Bush War?’
‘Something on those lines, yes. It wasn’t a picnic, the Bush War.’
‘So I’ve gathered.’
‘No. I was watching some of the younger men, the ones who did the bad fighting, you know. I knew when they were switching off–you could see them doing it. I knew, you see, because I’d done it. I wanted to say, No, don’t do it, don’t do that, you don’t want to spend your life as I’ve done. You know, it’s like living inside a sort of glass jar. But they had to switch off. You can’t see your best friends being blown to pieces