He reported the encounter when at last he got back. The officer said laconically that he had been a bit lucky: “The chap was out having a look-see, probably. Thought there might be more of you. Anyway, you shooed him off. The new mortar’s in position. I gather they roped you in for another job.”
All day, they watched and waited. From time to time, news and information flew through the lines, arriving on the field telephones, passed from trench to trench: the Gloucesters were getting it badly, the enemy had bypassed the road, were moving behind their own positions. The word came more than once: “There are bloody thousands of them.”
Night came. Another stretch of that treacherous darkness. They had gone twenty-four hours already without sleep, and those who were not on watch lay in the bottom of the trenches, clobbered with exhaustion. He did so himself, when his turn came, and fell at once into some pit of semiconsciousness that was laced with gunfire, bugles, and screams. He surfaced to find the sergeant shaking him, and shot up wildly, reaching for his pistol. But the sergeant was only telling him that he was due on watch again. The nightmare of his brief sleep gave way to the awful truth of that night: the noisy flashing darkness, the grim uncertainty. Nobody seemed to know what was going on, where the enemy were, how they were moving, whether their own positions were holding on.
All around him, there were Tyneside voices. They brought an incongruous homeliness to this benighted place. They evoked his city, and the Tyne Valley, and Morpeth and Accrington and all the places that he knew. He could tell where a man came from by subtle inflections, by the way he used a word, by the words that he used. He could place others, too: the officers’ voices with their identifying vowel sounds, their overtones of the BBC, of masters at school, of his family doctor—the tones of authority. It seemed extraordinary that this entire elaborate social system could have crossed the world intact and asserted itself here among these Korean hills, amid this mayhem.
At daylight, orders came. They were to withdraw once more to a position half a mile farther back from the river, joining up with X and Y Companies. It was likely that the enemy would harass the withdrawal.
He anticipated attack at every step. Each line of rocks was a threat, each stand of trees. He was jolted out of his weariness by tension, waiting for the screams, the bugles, the grenades, as the company moved slowly across the hillsides. They were all on edge; he saw the sergeant scanning each rise ahead, silent and intent. He saw officers stop and turn their binoculars on the skyline, on the next ridge; he did the same himself. The place seemed to team with men, conspicuous and vulnerable—brown-clad figures moving through the scrub. His platoon was toward the front of the withdrawal; at one point they were within sight of the road, and saw trucks and lorries, a couple of tanks. From the hill beyond, there came mortar fire. And then, once more, U.S. planes came hurtling in, sweeping across that distant hill and the mortar flashes. In their wake there arose a line of dark red flame, a fiery snake against the green, and then great plumes of black smoke.
“That’s napalm,” said the sergeant. “Filthy stuff. Fries them, poor buggers.”
Somehow, they arrived at the new position without attention from the enemy. All the noise was coming now from the range of hills beyond the road and nearer to the river, where the Gloucesters’ positions were, and as the day went on, this intensified. They dug in, and lay there listening and watching. In their vicinity, there was little going on, just the occasional burst of fire from one of their own trenches as someone spotted movement. There was the sense that the enemy could be all around, waiting their moment.
Weary men brewed endless tea. Every hour or so, it seemed, he was handed a steaming mug, and drank automatically, grateful for a momentary alleviation of that nervous vigil. There were rumors now—word-of-mouth reports that hopped from trench to trench: the Gloucesters were surrounded, the entire brigade was going to pull out. He was so tired that he seemed to be beyond sensation, numbed into apathy, but with the talk of withdrawal he felt a rush of optimism. Never mind that after this there was heaven knew what else to come. Just to get away from these infested hills.
As darkness fell, the rumors were confirmed. There was to be a general withdrawal, by way of the road, the next day.
That night was quieter. They lay waiting—waiting for attack, waiting for dawn, for the prospect of getting out of this. There was speculation about their chances. He listened to the sergeant, who was acid about the order to use the road—“Bloody crazy. We’ll be sitting ducks. We should keep to the high ground.”—and thought that he was probably right. But most of the men were apathetic, worn out, and demoralized by their situation. News was filtering through now about the level of their own casualties in the counterattack on the hill—as high as 50 percent it was said. Several of his own men had been killed, his companions on the voyage out from England, including a man who lived round the corner from his home, with whom he had played street games when they were children. He thought of the mother, who would not yet know what had happened, going innocently about her business, perhaps chatting to his own mother at the butcher’s or the greengrocer, in a world of routine and normality.
When dawn came, there was a thick mist. They were all anxious to move, and the mist seemed like useful cover, but the order to get going did not come until midmorning, by which time the sun had broken through. There were U.S. planes swooping down frequently now, gunning for the Chinese mortar positions that threatened the road, and their own artillery trying to pick off machine-gun posts on the enemy-held hillsides.
They began to make their way down toward the road, following orders to report at designated checkpoints. He was surprised and impressed by the calculation of it all, the careful counting through of men, the determined imposition of some kind of order upon this anarchy. They wound their way over this now-familiar terrain—the grassy ridges, the stands of stumpy trees, the scrub and the sudden slopes covered with slippery shale—and he became aware of his blistered feet. He had taken his boots off at some point during the night, and had been startled to find his feet raw and bleeding. On the scale of things, this seemed a triviality; from the next trench he could hear the moans of a man who had taken a bullet through his thigh. He had put his socks and boots back on again, feeling vaguely ashamed. But now his feet felt as though he were walking on fireballs.
He was at the rear of the patrol, urging on stragglers. When a grenade exploded only yards away, they flung themselves down while the sergeant fired a few bursts with the bren gun at their invisible pursuers. Then they got up and plunged with new commitment over the last hundred yards toward the road—a chaos of vehicles and men. They gunfire was intensifying; it was clear that they were under attack from the hillsides both behind and beyond.
The road was a wide, rough track, busy with jeeps, trucks, and Centurion tanks. An officer was directing the men pouring down from the higher ground. They were to head south by any means available: “Hitch a ride if you can; otherwise, just keep moving.” The pass ahead was held by the Ulsters, and the tanks were returning fire from the road, but the enemy was attacking the withdrawal : “Keep your eyes open, and take cover if you need to.”
He heard the officer, looked at the cluttered road, the hostile hills, and thought: Where? He saw wounded men sitting and lying by the roadside, bloody field dressings on heads or limbs. He saw dead men. He saw tracer from an enemy machine-gun position on the opposite hillside. And then willy-nilly he became a part of this disheveled rout, men straggling ahead in groups, some of them helping out a wounded companion, vehicles crashing along the rutted dusty road, tanks with guns blazing.
He kept stumbling, made unsteady by exhaustion. The roadside was littered with debris—equipment that had been jettisoned, the occasional burnt-out vehicle. And when he looked back he realized with an icy twinge of fear that the enemy were clearly visible—the whole place crawling with figures, running along the ridges, leaping down the slopes.
Any truck that passed him was already filled
with men, and equally the tanks that were also operating as evacuation vehicles, with men clinging to the hulls as they lurched over the uneven ground. The sergeant, walking beside him, said caustically, “Like Newcastle in the fucking rush hour. And we’ve missed the bloody bus. Have a smoke, sir.” They paused to light cigarettes, and as they did so both heard the whine of a shell and flung themselves into the ditch that ran parallel to the road.
He lay facedown in damp reeds as the explosion rocked the ground. At the same instant, something hit his leg, slamming into it like a kick in the calf on a football pitch. When he sat up, gingerly, he saw smoke billowing from an upturned jeep, and a body on the road. He looked down; blood was seeping through his trousers. His leg felt entirely numb—not painful, just an absolute numbness, and he could only move it with difficulty, as though he were trying to haul someone else’s limb.
He looked for the sergeant; he was still lying facedown in the ditch. He crawled over to him, and then he saw that the back of the man’s head was one sickening mess of blood and bone.
He tried to stand up, and could not. He was weak and dizzy. He knew that he should do something about the wound, and started to fumble for a field dressing. A truck loaded with men hurtled past, and another tank. A mortar exploded farther back along the road; the whole place was a cacophony of noise. He found the dressing and pulled his trouser leg up. And then someone was squatting down beside him: “Can you walk?”
He shook his head.
“Here, let’s have a look.” An Irish voice; a lieutenant from the Ulsters. The lieutenant bound up the wound, which was hurting now, a deep throbbing pain. “It’s not too bad, but it’s enough to get you out of this. You’ll be going home, my friend. Just hang on—there’s a carrier coming through behind with other wounded. They’ll pick you up. Good luck.”
He saw the man go, running to join other hurrying figures. He sat in the ditch, and became aware of more scurrying men, coming down from the hillsides, descending upon the road, dozens of them, scores, and he realized that these were not their own men; this was the enemy, these were Chinese infantry.
Two Chinese leaped across the ditch, only yards away, glanced at him, and ran past. He groped for his pistol, and realized that he no longer had it; he must have lost it when he and the sergeant flung themselves into the ditch. A tank came roaring up and he saw to his astonishment that Chinese soldiers were swarming onto the hull. Others were pouring after it up the road. The tank fired, two of the Chinese fell, the rest ducked down beside the road.
He tried again to stand, and found that he could, though pain shot through his leg. He began to walk, uncertainly: “. . . just keep moving.” An Ulsterman with his arm in a sling caught up with him and they moved along side by side. Chinese soldiers ran past. He heard another tank approaching, and the burst of fire coming from it. The Ulsterman said, “Christ, better get down,” and they dived for the ditch. There was searing pain from his leg, and he must have blacked out. When he surfaced, there were two Chinese standing over him, one of them holding a pistol.
He saw the Chinese gesture that they should get up, and knew that he would not be going home, not now, perhaps not at all.
Transatlantic
A few years ago, I met up with a woman I had known when we were both young. She had gone to work in the United States when she was twenty, had married there, and never came back. Now, she was a California matron, with children and grandchildren, her voice and mannerisms entirely American except that here and there was just a hint, a flavor, of the English girl that she had been—like those elderly GI brides one sometimes sees on television programs, reminiscing against a backdrop of their former selves lined up on the quayside over half a century ago. Looking at her, listening to her, it was as though she had undergone some metamorphosis. She had not just grown older; she had shed one skin and assumed another.
After I left university, I worked for a couple of years as research assistant to the then professor of race relations at Oxford. One day, he was visited by an American academic colleague. Maybe they ran out of professional small talk, or maybe my employer had other commitments—anyway, he brought this man into my office after a while with the suggestion that I take him for a conducted tour of Oxford. Fine by me; it was one of those golden October days—far preferable to be out and about rather than moldering at a desk. I did the visitor proud: a choice selection of colleges, the Bodleian, the Ashmolean, Christ Church meadow, the river. He was entranced. We got on famously. I was twenty-two; he was—oh, old, forty at least, an avuncular figure. Let’s be clear, this is not a tale of lost romance. Over a farewell drink in the Mitre he asked what I had in mind for the future—noting, presumably, that my present job was a pretty dead-end affair. I think I said something about wanting to travel at some point. He gave me his card: “My university has postgraduate programs that might appeal to you. Let me know if you’re interested.”
I didn’t. That road not taken vanishes into mist. Not long after, I met the man I would marry.
In America, I have frequently experienced a sea change. Suddenly—on a plane, in a city, talking to a stranger—I have felt as though I brushed shoulders with some other self, a person that I am not but easily could have been. It is to do with a transatlantic sense of expansion, of license, of possibility, the way in which people seem more relaxed, freed up, at one with the world. They talk to anyone; they talk to me. I have felt, sometimes, a sense of energy, of empathy. I have taken a sidestep and found myself acting differently, becoming a person who is still entirely me but also some extra self that I don’t quite recognize. Is this a hint of an alternative destiny, an alternative persona responding to the requirements of another environment?
Equally, once in a while, hearing an American voice, I know a peculiar nostalgia, as though I am listening to some echo, as though I am glimpsing an intimacy that I have missed, some other existence.
The first time I crossed the Atlantic, and woke to birdsong that was wonderfully wrong, I knew that evolution is true. I lay listening to the dawn sounds of a New England morning—blue jays, mourning doves, chickadees—and these were like some significant refraction of my Oxfordshire mornings with their wood pigeons, blackbirds, and robins—like, and yet quite unlike. I knew then that first hint of this alluring alternative universe. I have known the same sensation in Australia, once again, waking into the Wonderland of alien bird calls and being filled with wild exhilaration, a euphoric response to this diverse world.
To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction. And when a writer contemplates her own life, there is an irresistible compulsion to tinker with it, to try out a crucial adjustment here or there. What follows is one such tinkering. The protagonist is not myself, her experience and her associates are invented, but she is perhaps a suggestion of another outcome.
She said, “We’re almost there. Another mile or two, I guess.”
Ben was driving. Carol had the map spread out on her lap. They had progressed from motorways to major roads into this thicket of lanes, the car now squeezed by greenery as though they wound into the land itself. It was the first trip to England in eighteen months, the first since her mother had died, the first in which she had no parent to visit, no anchor. She was forty-nine, and she thought that this parentlessness felt as though you had gone to sea in a small boat and found yourself out of sight of any shore. There was no longer that distant, reassuring shape. Nothing now between you and the horizon.
Ben switched off the radio; he kept putting it on for the news. “Do you think Mrs. Thatcher is mad? I mean that. Clinically unhinged?”
; The backdrop to this trip was the Falklands War. In hotel rooms, in the hired car, the disembodied babble of politicians, of government spokesmen, of Parliament, traveled with them daily. They knew by heart the names of ships in the British task force; they sounded like the language of hymns—Endeavour, Invincible, Fearless. The Argentine aircraft carrier was called The Twenty-fifth of May.
“If she is, then the rest of the Cabinet are too.”
He patted her knee. “I don’t hold you responsible for your compatriots.”
She said, “You better not. Anyway, I’m not sure that they are, anymore.”
He was her second husband, an economist at Harvard. They had been together for five years. Her first marriage, from which the children came, had melted away, diminishing from initial happiness long ago when he and she were young, through discontent to an ultimate indifference; both had been glad to step aside, without much rancor. The children were now in their early twenties and busy with their own lives. She had met Ben a year after the divorce, and knew a contentment with him that sometimes made them both incredulous. He too was on a second shift.
She did not know what to expect, at the end of these twisting lanes, when eventually they reached the house. She had not seen Aunt Margaret for years, except briefly at her mother’s funeral. Let alone Uncle Clive. Colonel Clive Baseley. She stared out of the car window into the intimacy of hedgebanks and trees whose branches sometimes whipped the glass.
Each time she saw this country again it seemed so small. So neat, so dapper, so miniature. The little hedged fields, the dinky villages. It had surely shrunk? She had never seen it thus when she was young; it had been quite normal then, ordinary, expected. Now, it was a constant surprise. She found herself gazing in mild astonishment at landscapes that were eerily familiar, but also quite alien—those church towers, the flowery facades of pubs, terraces of tiny houses.