Back then there had been a whole tribe of children, who called themselves ‘The Pals’. Archie and Daniel Pitt lived next door; Rosie, Christabel, Ottilie and Sophie in this house; and Ashbridge and his brothers on the other side. But now the children had grown. Ashbridge and his brothers were dead. Archie was on the North-West Frontier. Christabel had struck up an unconventional friendship with a green-eyed artist who comported herself like a man, and moved between Lewes, Hexham, Chelsea and Bloomsbury, mounting successful and controversial exhibitions all over the country. Sophie had married her chaplain, and Rosie and Daniel were planting tea in Ceylon. Of the children, only Ottilie remained, the most sensible and quiet of all of them, with her big eyes, her wide hips, her brown bob of hair, and her unkissed lips that would have been so adept at kissing. She was still waiting for Archie, who was himself consumed with a painful and impossible passion for her sister, Rosie. Ottilie was too grown up now to venture into the dark passages beneath the house, and so she stayed upstairs with her increasingly peculiar mother and her genial father.
The entrance to the labyrinth was at the back of the house, inside a large tenebrous cave beneath the conservatory; a room full of garden implements, piles of sacking, the wheelbarrow and the mower. It was here that Oily Wragge had his lair.
He had returned at the end of the war, escaping at last the malnutrition and enslavement of his labour on the Ottoman railways, but too sick to carry on soldiering. He had been skeletal, his eyes glowing with sickness, his mind whirling with the horror of his memories, his intestines all but ruined by enteritis and typhus. Sometimes his head still spun in response to the hundreds of blows from rifle butts. He still heard the slavers’ cries of ‘Yallah! Yallah!’, his back would forever bear the scars of the floggings with plaited hide, and he would always walk a little gingerly because of Commandant Musloom Bey’s enjoyment of the bastinado.
Oily had married before he left for the war, because the woman was pregnant, but upon his return four years later he had found her gone. The neighbours said she had absconded with a Gordon Highlander. Oily had never known his child. He was told he should write to the Colonel of the Gordons, because the officers were good at sorting out these kinds of things, but he put it off because of a strange terror, and because he could not write.
Oily was a Norwich boy. When he wanted to say ‘I’m going’, it came out as ‘Oi’m a gooin’. Nowadays his surviving comrades of the 2nd Battalion, the Norfolk Regiment, were trawling the endless desert roads of Mesopotamia and the plateaus of Anatolia for the scattered bones of their friends, but Oily Wragge had found himself work at The Grampians as a gardener, and lived contentedly in the dank cave of tools under the conservatory until Mr McCosh discovered him there, and told him he might only stay for as long as it took to find decent accommodation.
Oily Wragge had never minded living the troglodyte’s life beneath the conservatory. There were no lice or fleas, as in the hovels he had inhabited in Anatolia, and, in the absence of the other slaves, it seemed incomparably and wonderfully roomy. How pleasant it was to stretch out one’s legs, roll a cigarette made with proper tobacco, and knock back huge mugs of tea with real milk and sugar. It was cool in there in the summer, and not as cold in winter as the Anatolian plateau, nothing you couldn’t cope with by piling up the sacks and drawing over a greatcoat. There was no comrade doubled up with intestinal spasms, taking days to die, and no Arab or Kurdish tribesman to strip him naked, beat him and leave him for dead.
Mr Wragge was content in his modest paradise. After the death marches, and the months of tunnelling in the mountains with a pick, this English garden was indeed a dream of Eden, and therein he set about pulling himself together. He pruned fruit trees and roses, and forked out weeds. He mowed militarily immaculate rows of stripes across the lawn, and then along it at right angles. He cleaned and oiled the mower, and took it to bits twice every summer to decoke it. He had a tin with his eponymous oily rag in it, to wipe the tools clean each evening so that they would not rust. He marked out the lines of the tennis court, and left a white spot in each place where a croquet hoop should be, were the family to tire of playing tennis. He cleaned and polished the moletraps, even though there were no moles. In the autumn he laid up the apples in the apple shed, with the keepers at the back, each one meticulously wrapped in its own piece of brown paper. He made weak cider for himself by pulping a share of the apples and squeezing it through a cloth. Every day he would release the gas with a quick twist of the screwcaps, until there was no more hiss, and he knew it was ready to drink. All those years of slavery and torment without one drink of alcohol, and now he could linger over each appley mouthful until his tongue and cheeks began to tingle and his eyes rolled with delight. It was bliss.
Oily Wragge bought a Primus stove and a brown teapot with his first wage, so that he would not have to depend on Cookie’s limited generosity for tea. He bought a small skillet so that he could cook himself fried bread and sausages for lunch.
Even after finding lodgings, Oily Wragge thought of the tool store as his real home. There was one small cracked window, overgrown outside by a climbing rose, so it let in very little light, but Oily made a curtain out of a sack, and each morning he drew back the curtain when he arrived for work, and closed it again each evening when he left. Sometimes, especially in summer, he reverted to staying there at night, gazing in wonder at the stars as he staggered out, woozy from cider, to urinate in the rose beds.
Oily Wragge was determined to salvage his sanity out of the purgatorial experience of captivity. He attempted slowly and deliberately to come to terms with his war in Mesopotamia and his enslavement in Anatolia, by sorting his memories into the least painful order. He tried to look at them, as it were, from the outside, as if he were a spectator, and not someone to whom they had happened. Eventually he began to consider that the ordering of his recollections was in fact not the most important thing; what was important was the final memory, the one he deliberately kept ’til last, the one that would be nearest to salvation, the one that blazed with light. This memory would have to cancel out the darkness and lift his spirit from the slough.
When he was not busy in the garden, Oily Wragge climbed into the wheelbarrow and went to sleep, his head lolling on a wad of sacking. He instinctively knew that it would require an eternity of sleep to restore his peace, for the world had to be excluded in order for him to wake up and go back out into it again.
Oily Wragge dreamed of Mespot, which is the arsehole of the universe, where Basra is the arsehole of the arsehole, and Kut is the arsehole of the arsehole of the arsehole.
* * *
—
The many months of siege, when we confidently knew that our provisions would not run out before the relief force arrived. Us placing bets on the day of their arrival. Then the floods that cut us off.
The dust flies, sunstroke, the stomach cramps, the dysentery and sweat, the flies in every orifice, on food and water. The shamal wind that blows for weeks and covers and fills the world with dust. Oh, Oily, I can’t see a thing.
The Arabs selling us eggs. The Marsh Arabs concealed in the reeds, shooting us down for fun. Townshend’s regatta. The hard bites of the sandflies. No medicine, no quinine, no vegetables, no castor oil, rumours of sharks in the river. The wounded at Vital Point, the camel thorn shrubs that ripped our clothes and flesh, the ammunition dumps aflame, our mate Bill shot nine times. Oh, Oily, they’ve made me a bloomin’ pepper pot. The ranks of the wounded laid out in the bazaar, the incessant frenzy of digging in, the water carriers picked off one by one by snipers, the Turkish corpses bloating on Corpse Hill, the star shells and Very lights throwing the night into absolute light and total shadow. I remember how lovely the star shells were.
The daily Hymn of Hate, the fighting all day on Christmas Day, the gangrene, the ceasefire when the Turks came with iron hooks on long poles to drag the corpses to pits, the corpses that fell to bi
ts or exploded.
The Tigris in flood that made us almost an island, the implacable wind and rain, the rain that marinaded the corpses all the better for the sun to come out after and cook them. The obsolete aircraft dropping relief parcels that fell in the river and wouldn’t have been enough. Atta bread and horseflesh. The Hindu soldiers dying more quickly than us, fifteen a day from scurvy, because there were no vegetables and they wouldn’t eat horses and donkeys, the Muslim soldiers dying more quickly than us whilst waiting for fatwas that let them eat horses and donkeys.
Tetanus, scurvy, beriberi, our legs swelling up and then the rest of our bodies, and when at last our heads swelled up, that’s when we died. Mesopotamian mud that clings like the grip of drowning men. Starvation, scorpions, slugs. Eating the pretty starlings. The Last Post, the Reverend H. Spooner in his white surplice, tireless at burial. The desert covered in graves. The natives stealing the wooden crosses for cooking, a cloud of flies so dense that nothing at all could be seen. Fanny the giant antique cannon of Ctesiphon, her shots that always fell short.
Eating a bitch and her five pups. Oh, Oily, I never thought I’d sink to this.
The rumble of cannon, the skirl of pipes in the distance, mirages, the vivid lightning at night, the jaundice, the starvation that one day brings the eerie silence of surrender, the total destruction of all our useful kit. Bonfires of saddlery, documents, bedding, chairs, guncotton in the breeches of the guns, the handing over of officers’ swords, the cholera, the black biscuits, the evacuation of General Townshend’s dogs, the biblical plague of fleas, our interpreters hanged in rows in the square, an Arab about to be hanged who throws me his prayer beads, the flogging and hanging of Sheikh Abbas.
The first death march, the hundred-mile trudge to Baghdad.
Starved and ill, in heat so scorching it can’t be imagined or told, without food, without water, we are driven along by Arab horsemen. The beatings with rifle butts, the trampling of the dying, the theft of our boots and clothes. Enteritis. Yallah! Yallah! Yallah! Move on, move on. Shit running down our legs, pains like childbirth in our guts. Oh, Oily, I’ll never make it, I’m falling out, I’m going to die down there, in the stones. Goodbye, old son, if I make it back I’ll try to get a message to your mum.
The stripping of the dead, the skipping of vultures, the bark of jackals, the rivers of black beetles, the rain, a plague of inedible frogs.
Septic sores, oedema.
And after Baghdad, it’s six hundred miles, twenty miles a day to Ras-el-Ain. Two thousand two hundred and twenty-two dead on the march, stripped naked, starved, bayoneted, beaten, left behind in the road. The horsemen galloping past, holding their guns by the sling, swinging the stocks at our heads. This is a game, their own special kind of polo, they whoop with delight, to hell with the filthy infidels Yallah! Yallah! Yallah! The villagers throwing stones as we beg for food, the women and children hissing, the drawing of forefingers across the throat, the real thing from the guards, just for the practice, just for the entertainment.
The vast dogs set upon us by their shepherds, attacking in pairs. The floggings and shootings at Ctesiphon. Wrapping puttees round our feet to replace our stolen boots, wading waist-deep in mud to reach the high road, Crosse & Blackwell jam tins for cooking all the food we didn’t have with water we didn’t have, the jibes of the Arabs, ‘English finished, English finished’, the sick camp by the river, no floor, no walls, straw mats up on poles. No water, no medicine, no food, no latrines. The unwashed bandages, the unsterilised blades. Oh, Oily, I’m shitting myself to death.
Blessed are the dying for they shall soon be dead.
Paraded for Enver Pasha’s satisfaction, our bodies wrapped in blankets and left.
Nineteen deaths per day.
The march, the never-ending march, a road just travelled by Armenians. The wells filled with mutilated women and children, the hovels packed with Armenian bones, the houses destroyed, the naked skeletons by the roadside cleaned up by jackals and vultures, the Armenian women with horseshoes nailed to their feet, the escorts who can’t count higher than a hundred, and count us over and over.
The flour and wholemeal at the end of the day, without any means to cook it, we’re too ill to cook, there’s no water, our tongues swell up in our mouths. A bivouac of all we possess, and we sleep around in a ring, to stop the Arabs from stealing. Sandfish a penny each. Oily, can you spare me a penny? Has anyone got a penny? Ain’t nobody got one penny?
Naked except for our feet. The vast burns festering on our shoulders. The dying stripped and thrashed, and left to the tribes. The Turks hiding the dying from General Mellis. At Jolahi, the massacre by neglect. At Nisibin, a doctor giving us poison.
At Bagtche a loaf and a week’s rest, and water that ran to reach us through six Armenian cemeteries. At Taurus, the burial of the dying along with the dead.
Being forced to buy water from a dogskin, only five hundred yards from the river where the water ran for nothing.
Two thousand miles on foot.
Processions of the insane, the maddened Armenians, gibbering, eating dirt and falling, emaciated babies that clung to the necks of dead mothers, naked lacerated trembling women striped all over with weals, seeping with pus from the piercing of bayonets.
At Afion on Thursdays, the weekly floggings to death.
Malaria, rheumatic fever, typhus.
The Commandant Musloom Bey, who flogged us and starved us and opened a shop to sell our clothes, and dragged the youngsters away to fuck them from behind.
* * *
—
Lying in his wheelbarrow in the twilight of his cave under the conservatory, this is what Oily Wragge remembers of his war in Mesopotamia, the arsehole of the world, and of his slavery in Anatolia. He remembers either in order or in no order at all, but before he shuts them out he remembers the following things:
General Mellis who tirelessly bullied the Turks and gave us money and found us food and refused to leave us, until the Turks lost patience and sent him away by another route.
The women of Kersheba who let us wash our feet and gave us yogurt.
An American priest who came with carts and took away the dead.
In Mosul the gift of half a pound of raisins each, from an unknown hand.
Mr Brissell, the American Consul, who sent us disinfectant and sheep, and died of the cholera he caught from us.
The Benedictine nuns of Baghdad.
Armenians in towns who gave us dates and cigarettes, knowing they’d be flogged to death if caught.
Dr Illia, the Turkish doctor, who tried to help.
The Anatolian Greeks in the mountains and deserts who knelt in the stones and prayed for us as we passed.
Blessed are the dying, for they shall soon be dead;
Blessed is General Mellis;
Blessed are the women of Kersheba;
Blessed is the unknown American priest;
Blessed are the Benedictine nuns of Baghdad;
Blessed is the giver of Mosul;
Blessed are the secret donors of dates and cigarettes;
Blessed is Mr Brissell, the American Consul,
For the gift of disinfectant and sheep;
Blessed is Dr Illia, and
Blessed the Anatolian Greeks
Who knelt in the stones
And prayed for us as we passed.
8
Samadara (1)
This is what happens: sometimes the dorai falls in love with a native girl, and sometimes he just wants to put himself inside her until he gets bored. If he has children he usually falls in love with their ayah, and if not, it is a girl from amongst the tea pickers. The ayah in dorai Pitt’s house was called Preethi, and she was my s
econd cousin, and there was no one more pretty and nice than she was, and she used to talk to me about dorai Pitt, and there was nothing I didn’t know about what went on in his house. Nothing ever happened between her and dorai Pitt, but I don’t know the reason for that. She loved him, but she also loved dorasani Rosie, and perhaps she thought of him as a daughter would. Mainly she loved Esther, the little girl, and she had a great deal of freedom with her, so often Esther played with the native children, and learned some Tamil from them. I knew that Preethi would be a very good mother one day, from watching her with Esther, and in that I turned out to be right.
You know, we Tamil girls are brought up to be very nice and obedient and when we are young many of us are beautiful. We are small and slender, and we are dark, but it makes our teeth look more white and our tongues more pink, and when we like a man we look at him with our brown eyes and he catches us looking, and we look away, and then we cast our eyes to the ground, and then we look up again, and if he is still looking we smile and look away once more. We know how to glance out of the side of the eyes and we know how to wear sparkling jewellery because this place is very rich in precious stones and there are places where you find amethysts in the gravel of the road. Also, we are shy, and this makes us tempting.