VARIETY
The Wrath to Come
W
ITH THE exception of a
few weeks of bombing in
London, I have experienced only
the backwash of war. I have ex–
isted in curious backwaters. My
four years of service comprise two ·
and a half years as a battery sur–
veyor in the R. A. (Field), six
months as a alerk ditto and a
year in the Pay Corps. I have also
been a patient in a psychiatric
hospital (after two and a half
years at the same job it seems I
began to behave rather oddly)
and loitered for short periods at
the R.
A.
Depot and an Army
Selection Center. I never went
further than N. Ireland, where I
did my first
16
months. The only
period I spent technically in ac–
tion was a glorious summer on
beach defence in the S. E., during
which I completed a quasi-auto–
biographical novel called
Satur-
11ine.
A sense of unreality has in
fact pervaded the whole course
of my military career, and this is
no doubt responsible for a general
lowering of nervous tone which
has accompanied my descent by
easy stages from the medical cat–
egory Al to the medical category
C2. I do not feel that I have help–
ed
in any considerable degree to
win the war, but on the other hand
neither have I d6ne the nation a
palpable harm.
I have had a number of unfort–
unate encounters and fell at vari–
ous times a prey to self-pity and
resentment, sudden rages and fits of
the giggles, abysmal cynicism, trem–
ors and flashes, faintness, teetotal–
ism, sexual repression, pimples un-
279
der the collar, earache and
anorexia
nervosa
or loss of appetite.
It
is all
a little difficult to summarise.
What have I learnt? I have
learnt enough ballistics to fill an
article in the
Encyclopedia Bri–
tannica
and enough survey to keep
me henceforward from being puz–
zled by the
b~haviour
of men with
theodolites. I could make an ac–
curate map. I also know more
than I did about English towns,
the English countryside and En–
glishmen. I know Ulster and know
that it contains two good poets
and two good novelists, but I saw
no signs of a literary renaissance
either there or anywhere else.
The novelty of mixing with the
working classes was spoilt for me
by the fact that it was no novelty.
I was brought up with miners and
textile workers, and my grand–
mother took in washing. I am bi–
lingual and could so live incon–
spicuously with the midlanders
who formed the majority of my
comrades. I found between myself
and them a remarkable unanimity
of feeling. It is true that they be–
trayed no exceptional longing for
a proletarian literature, but then
neither do
I.
The people with
whom I have felt at variance were
clerks and salesmen. In ones and
twoes I have found that middle–
class types made an excellent
leaven· so long as they were not
eaten up with ambition, but in
larger groups they invariably
create what C. S. Lewis called
"pockets of evil" and generate an
atmosphere in which it is difficult
to breathe. The officer corps un–
doubtedly suffers in quality from
