By the time the train reached Kilmarnock it was smirring, that fine West of Scotland rain that doesn’t seem much at the time, but soaks you as thoroughly as falling in a river. I pulled my mackintosh out of my case and put it on. The road up to Bonnyton was achingly familiar but it looked more rundown, the sandstone blacker. Maybe it was the rain. I felt the now familiar black mood descend and I fought to banish it. I didn’t want to spoil my homecoming. But as I took the hill my stride grew shorter, my gait slower, as though the rain was lead. I paused under the railway bridge and smoked a fag until I got hold of myself.
It was a bleak return. I was in civvies this time, the kilt handed back last October together with the major’s crowns. It would have been nice to have had just one last saunter down the High Street in full dress uniform in my acting rank before they bumped me back to captain on demob. Sporting the medal ribbons of the Africa Star, the Italy Star and the France and Germany Star; like the awards at primary school for spelling, writing and sums. To have dropped casually into the Wheatsheaf, and bought a round or two for my old mates, and let them mock me gently: ‘I hope the guy was deid when you stole his uniform, Brodie.’ Or: ‘I didnae think the Catering Corps gave oot medals.’ And so on, and so on, but seeing in their eyes just a hint of the envy or admiration that they’d rather die before admitting.
It wouldn’t have the same impact to roll up in my demob outfit and explain exactly what a freelance journalist did for a living. They’d call me the ‘paperboy’ or ask why I couldn’t get a full-time job. They’d mock me all the harder when I said I specialised in crime reporting, and that there was more to it than sitting in the Old Bailey fleshing out lurid stories of straying spouses being caught in flagrante delicto. The phrase always made me smile: while the crime was blazing. It conjured images of wild passion and pounding bed springs. The truth was usually duller; it was generally a set-up in an accommodating hotel to get the divorce. The ‘lovers’ would be found in their underwear waiting for the photographer to show up. At which point they’d grapple a bit on the bed and look as enamoured with each other as two strangers could in front of a grinning audience.
Then there was the limp from the shrapnel I took in Sicily in ’43 after chasing Rommel up the North African coast. The leg wounds earned me two pleasant months in a hospital in Alexandria and a ticket to officer training back in Blighty. When I kept up the exercises the limp didn’t show. But since I got back to London last autumn, I’d let things slide. If I wasn’t exploding at the bureaucracy involved in getting my hands on my Army pension or a nice bit of bacon, I was sunk in gloom feeling sorry for myself. I’d meet a girl in a pub and we’d get on great until I went into one of my fugues and spoil it all. My local quack said I should buck up and prescribed iron tonic. He said it was normal, that London was full of men like me. Which would explain the punch-ups I got into in the bars I frequented.
I blamed it on the extra four months I served after the fighting stopped last May. It was my own fault. My hitherto underused German was no sooner on display at the surrender of the 15th Panzer Brigade than I was seconded to the clear-up task force interrogating Nazi camp commandants and SS zealots. While my regiment was shipped home to be showered with the roses and kisses deserving of heroes, I was noting down the forced confessions of psychopaths and fanatics. Useful training for a journalist I suppose.
They let me home to a bitter autumn. A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey…
I chose to be demobbed in London. A grateful nation gave me a Burton’s suit and trilby, a good mac, a solid pair of shoes and enough money to keep me drunk for as long as my liver lasted. Whenever I sobered, the tremors started. Whenever I slept, storm troopers came for me with slavering dogs and whistles. My language skills seemed to have improved; the nightmares were in German.
It was easier to stay drunk, skulking in south London, feeling sorry for myself, plunging in and out of black moods. Waking up with lead weights on my chest. Suffocating in my dreams. A few times the neighbours knocked on their ceiling to complain about the noise, like murder was being committed. I thought they were imagining things until I woke to the sound of someone sobbing and found it was me. Christmas came and went and winter ate into my battered bones. I hunched over tepid briquettes with a quilt round me gazing into the glow, looking for my future but only seeing my past.
I wanted to go home to Scotland, but how could I face them in this state? A wreck. A drunk. Just a liability to my mother. I fended her off with letters but I knew from the tone of her replies she was worried sick. They were even asking about me at her kirk. Where was her wee boy? The bursary winner, the scholar, the one that escaped. What was I up to? Why didn’t I come home to see her? Throughout, she never stopped going, never explained, never sought comfort or understanding from a soul. She’d never needed anyone’s approval except that of her man, my dad. And she was as certain of that fifteen years after his death as the day he married her.
But I hadn’t been completely forgotten. I was demobbed at the same time as the Guard’s brigadier who’d run the interrogation programme out of Berlin. He’d been given his old job back: on the board of the London Bugle. We had a beer. We had several beers. He got his editor to fling me some crumbs and keep flinging them at me until one day as the year turned I caught one. I managed to stay sober long enough to crack out a thousand words on black marketeering. It didn’t take much footslogging round my favourite bars to get the ammunition. The Bugle seemed to like the article, well, half of it anyway. They asked for more and I was beginning to scribble irregular pieces on the darker side of London life. I’d even started going to Les’s boxing gym to get my leg moving again and help soak up the anger that seemed always on tap.
So this cry for aid was premature. I wasn’t ready. Guilt hung about me like a shroud. Guilt about how I’d loitered in London and not come home to see my mother. Guilt about how I’d let myself go. Guilt that I’d made it home and scores of better men hadn’t. Guilt that my first feeling in response to Hugh Donovan’s summons was anger. I stabbed my fag out and marched up the hill.