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By Root 2770 0

scarcely cured before it was time to go to war. That war, too, had been no doubt the reason why these ramshackle married quarters had never been demolished and replaced. When peace came, there were other matters to think about. Here we were accommodated on the ground floor, a back and front room. Of the five others who were to share this billet, four – two from the Loyals, two from the Manchesters – were in their late twenties. They did their unpacking and went off to find the Mess. The remaining subaltern, from a Midland regiment, was much younger. He was short and square, with dark skin, grey eyes and very fair curly hair.

‘Those Lancashire lads in here with us are a dumb crowd,’ he remarked to me.

‘What makes you think so?’

‘Do you know they thought I talked so broad I must come from Burton-on-Trent,’ he said.

He spoke as if he had been mistaken for a Chinese or Ethiopian. There was something of Kedward about him; something, too, which I could not define, of my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell. He did not have a smudgy moustache like Kedward’s, and his personality was more forceful, more attractive too.

‘We’re going to be right cooped up in here,’ he said. ‘Would you be satisfied if I took over this area of floor space, and left you as far as the wall?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘My name is Stevens,’ he said, ‘Odo Stevens.’

I told him my own name. He spoke with a North Country or Midland intonation, not unlike that Quiggin used to assume in his earlier days, when, for social or literary reasons, he chose to emphasize his provincial origins and unvarnished, forthright nature. Indeed, I could see nothing inherently absurd in the mistake the ‘Lancashire lads’ had made in supposing Stevens a native of Burton-on-Trent. However, I laughed and agreed it was a ludicrous error. I was flattered that he considered me a person to take into his confidence on the subject; glad, too, that I was housed next to someone who appeared agreeable. In the army, the comparative assurance of your own unit, whatever its failings, is at once dissipated by changed circumstances, which threaten fresh conflicts and induce that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no one cares a halfpenny whether you live or die.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Brum, of course.’

‘Birmingham?’

‘What do you think,’ he said, as if it were almost insulting to suppose the matter in the smallest doubt. ‘Can’t you tell the way I say it? But I’ve managed to keep out of my home town for quite a while, thank God.’

‘Don’t you like it there?’

‘Finest city in the world,’ he said, laughing again, ‘but something livelier suits me. As a matter of fact, I was on the continent for the best part of six months before I joined the army.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Holland, Belgium. Even got as far afield as Austria.’

‘Doing what?’

‘There was an exchange of apprentices for learning languages. I pick up languages pretty easily for some reason. They were beginning to think I’d better come home and do some work just at the moment war broke out.’

‘What’s your job?’

‘Imitation jewellery.’

‘You sell it?’

‘My pa’s in a firm that makes it. Got me into it too. A business with a lot of foreign connexions. That’s how I fixed up getting abroad.’

‘Sounds all right.’

‘Not bad, as jobs go, but I don’t want to spend a lifetime at it. That’s why I wasn’t sorry to make a change. Shall we push along to the Mess?’

We sat next to each other at dinner that night. Stevens asked me what I did for a living.

‘You’re lucky to have a writing job,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried writing myself. Sometimes think I might take it up, even though peddling costume jewellery is a good trade for putting yourself over with the girls.’

‘What sort of writing?’

‘Spot of journalism in the local paper – “Spring comes to the Black Country” – “Sunset on Armistice Day” – that sort of thing. I knock it off easily, just as I can pick up languages.’

I saw Stevens would go far, if he did not get killed. He was aware of his own taste for self-applause and prepared to laugh at it. The journalistic streak was perhaps what recalled Chips