What I Know I Cannot Say Read online

  Through the twins, both colliers when they could be, I was taken on, though not by them; and at fourteen, as a collier boy, apprenticed, you might say, to one veteran collier or another, and gratefully so. I was always set to work for those with no relatives of their own, so simpler to exploit. A few shillings were thrown your way sometimes. Our trumps. You learned by watching and by serving, as a slave, and what solidarity there was touted about, then and later, was never extended to the relationship between us and some of the bastards who worked us, their collier boys.

  Work underground, too, was never a uniform thing. Pits could, and did, vary as much as the seams that lay, variously, within them. There were wet pits where the water seeped and dropped, cold and constant, from the propped-up roofs to fill the roadways and stalls with deep, coal-slurried puddles through which you sloshed or in which you lay to cut the coal. There were dry pits where the moisture-less heat was such that, even in winter, you worked side by side, in singlets soaked so wet by your sweat that they stuck tight, black and prickly to your skin. All the coal I ever worked before the war had to be hand-cut and hand-got, and some had to be chiselled out from seams so low you had to crawl in and out underneath them with, often, a powder charge to dislodge the pressure, and then use muscle to pull it down in great, shuddering ledges and lumps as big as boulders which fissured open and glinted with their hidden light as our lamps picked it up even in the blanket darkness of underground.

  So-called normal conditions, varied and unpredictable as they were, were not the worst of it – nor was the danger from a collapsed roof or a rush of water from old headings, nor a fire-damp explosion. Things with which we all lived, necessarily insensible to it all the time we worked. But the true killing factor was the incessant, unchangeable, unremitting sameness of it all, from first light to pallid afternoons, or from nightfall to a crystal dawn that you shunned for bed. Relentless fatigue. Bodies running on empty. Minds drained. Exhaustion that no respite of sleep, of food, of drink, of any snatched pleasure, from sport to sex, could ever alleviate. It was a way of being tired, and working on despite it. That was a way of life. I felt for the first few years I worked as a collier boy that I would never face anything worse. Not even as a fully fledged collier myself.

  I would be wrong about that, too. But I was only fourteen, remember, when I first knew the wrist-breaking weight of a curling-box. That was real, and terrible to me. Curling boxes, wide and flat metal baskets with a downward curved lip at one end, used by collier boys to scoop up the coal pick-axed to the floor of narrow seams, anywhere from eighteen inches to two and a half feet high, by colliers lying on their sides, bellies distended, backs arched and forearms punching. Then the curling box slid in and under to be filled with the cut coal, up to half a hundredweight at a time, pulled out by extended arms and backs bent to strain with the weight and the angle before being shifted into a waiting dram, the smaller coal in-filled between the walls of lump. Hefted. Placed. Piled-up. Trimmed. A skillfully raced dram to be check-weighed. A boy’s extras, his trumps, could come from how well he judged the loading of his dram.

  There would be fine clouds of coal dust hanging and floating in suspension, filling the air, clogging it with their soft, pillowy swirls. Black particles of coal dust, big enough to be seen, some of them, as singular motes that could gather inside your nostrils, or smaller ones to cake your eyelids and thicken your eyelashes as if by grotesque mascaraed make-up which only Vaseline could later remove. Your tongue and your throat would parch and dry, with just a swig of tepid water from your tin jack at snap time to offer relief and to wash your lips, before a sandwich of bread and cheese and raw onion would be taken from its grimy, greaseproof paper and held up away from the squeal of the rats you learned to kick away with your hob-nailed boots. Thumb prints made black dents on the bread. There was always a rank smell beneath the earth, a compound of reused air streams and the whiff of the rotted plant matter that was, after all, the coal itself. The stink of our own shit, shift after shift, lay stagnant in the still air, wafted to us from the holes off the main roadways where we would squat to relieve ourselves. No cigarettes, of course, to ease the throat and fool dust-lined lungs, just plugs of tobacco sliced off with a knife between finger and thumb to chew until its juiciness of cured leaf could be gobbed out as a viscous stream of yellow-flecked spit.

  When the coal could not be extracted with ease we would be working to remove the accumulated mounds of muck and slurry, the heaped up scatter of stone and rubble which came down with the coal, especially when shot-firing had been used to advance the heading we were working. You’d skin your knuckles if you took your eyes off the rocks being thrown at you to clear the work space. Hang-nails or blackened ones set to die later were common, day by day, and the cuts and bruises that marked hands and chests and faces would stay as livid pockmarks, the blue scars that were the etched-in lines of coal which flesh folded itself over to trap beneath our skin.

  I broke fingers in both hands in this way. But unlike others I saw I had no broken or, worse, shattered limbs or a broken back, a splintered face, a crushed skull. Death left me alone even if life would not, claiming others, men who had to be carried out of the places at the coal face to which hours before they had walked and crawled and stumbled. Weariness does not even touch it, since we were not tired to the bone, as the empty saying goes; we were hollowed out with tiredness deep inside, as if our own seams of being were being mined. You can see why it can never be forgotten by those of us who endured it day by day, to be fed and watered and washed day by day, to be sent back, day by day. But remembering it, truly remembering it, is not, though I can put it no other way, in the detail of it – not really. It is in the beat, in the pulse of its memory, unbidden and unwanted in your blood.

  * * * * *

  SO MUCH HAPPENED TO YOUR GENERATION IN THE THIRTIES… HUNGER MARCHES, STAY DOWN STRIKES, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR… HOW WERE YOU AFFECTED PERSONALLY?

  Look, these things are markers you’ve picked up from books. Categories of a general life… Boxes which opened and closed, for some. Maybe other lives, older than mine or better informed, were held by them… contained by them. But not mine. Remember, Bran, I was only twenty in the middle of the thirties, and the coalfield was a mess after ’26. There was no organisation after that. I wasn’t a member of the union, the Fed, but then most people weren’t unless they held a Show Cards on the pithead to shame men into joining. Whatever fight back came was one that came after my time underground. I left when it properly began, with the stay-downs of 1935. Hunger was just a groaning stomach for me. Not a march. Whatever was beyond just getting by, I let pass over me. I had no family. No dependents. I drank with some butties, but no friends had grown up with me. I lodged, paid the rent, mostly in the home of an older, unemployable collier. When the strikes broke out – orchestrated, more like – I saw no reason not to work, paid no subs or dues and had not a political thought in my head. I could have been one of those who strolled down the street, flanked by policemen no bigger than battleships, howled at by pinafored women banging on kettles and drums, to earn my pittance. As a blackleg. A scab. It would not have troubled my conscience. I wasn’t yet twenty. I was alive with a vitality that was indifferent to what now figures for a common morality in history books. And, inasmuch as I had a motive to act one way or the other, it was having no ties and being otherwise adrift that inclined me to leave rather than fight on anyone’s side other than my own. It was all a blank for me, I promise you. And, you know, I would say that it was the same experience for most, except then made different, necessarily so, for those who had no choice but to stay.

  * * * * *

  WHEN, AND WHY, DID YOU LEAVE THE COALFIELD?

  That was when I left. As to exactly why, well; as I say, an explanation is not the same as a reason, though maybe I had no reason as such – only appetites, which I fed. In what I can only call a glimpse of a better life. Better in the feeding-me sense of it, that is. There were new arterial by-pass roads be
ing built across England, more in the South East and the Midlands than elsewhere. And factories being built for cars and other things we would seek to buy, all of us, later – wouldn’t we though? – but then, oddly and perversely enough, not by me.

  So, yes, I laboured. I tramped. I worked on building sites, in farms and in factories. I slept in doss houses. I slept rough. I shovelled whatever shit needed shovelling.

  My personal life had no, what shall I call it, grain to it. There were some girls, of course, and pictures and booze, but it was as abrupt and mechanical as eating and breathing. I will not trouble you with it, or myself with the pointlessness of it. I had escaped, was how I saw it.

  Other than for the one thing which had gripped me. I mean that I began to read. With no pattern to it, but without cease. Perhaps it was being in the warm, in public libraries. Maybe time to kill in the day. Anyway, I read anything, and everything. When my vocabulary petered out, I bought a pocket dictionary. I pondered new words. I puzzled over “paradox” and “ramifications”, over and over, I remember, in a way that has stuck . What they meant. Was it because I was living a paradox and it had its own ramifications? Yet your questions seek a sense of order where there was only chaos. I repeat that I had no expectations or direction in my life. What there was of hope and desire went into the drawings I still did – crudely, of course – and, secretly, into the colours I began to use beyond the lines. I think, though without my consciously knowing it, that the reading informed that, too.

  And then the war came, and the Army enrolled me as effortlessly as all else had swallowed me whole.

  * * * * *

  YOU WENT INTO THE ARMY, DIDN’T YOU? TELL ABOUT THAT, AND THE WAR.

  What I remember if, as now, I try again, is the routine of it: the repetitive training, the risible commands, the stretches of boredom, and then an added compound of the unknown, of an almost unbearable sense of scale, of men and distances, of removal to unthinkable desert spaces and sirocco winds full of sand which speckled your lips and clogged your nostrils. The terrifying, blind urgency of combat. No, more the way fear was displaced by killing, or being killed; or, if not displaced, somehow held in reserve until the time for terror returned, as you knew it would after North Africa and then into Sicily. Also, unwanted but physical, there is a reminder I cannot, living where we live, avoid. Rain. Cold. Dripping. Bone-chilling rain. Soaking through battle dress and oilskins both. Rain for weeks on end. The freezing, wet winter of 1943, and on and on into 1944. In sunny fuckin’ Italy. That’s what we all called it, and meant freeze-your-bollocks-off Italy. Before our lot went in at Cassino we waited, day by day, for three weeks; each morning stood down, waiting for the weather to lift so the bombs could be dropped. Each day not a torment, mind you. Just a pain. Get on with it, we all thought. And we said, “Send Bradman in to bat.” That was the trigger code dreamt up by some clown at HQ. Because it was New-Zealanders, Maoris mostly, who were to spearhead it all. And that clown didn’t know Bradman was an Aussie. Pissed the Kiwis off no end. So they waited, too, along with Gurkhas, Indians and our own Desert Rats. Me included. The latest to have a crack at Cassino, that small, nondescript cross-roads town, a stopping-off place for those going south to Naples or north to Rome. We were going north. Or trying to. Up Route Six. Up the Liri Valley that curved around Cassino to the left and arrived like an arrow into the Eternal city. If we broke through, that is. And then the Allied troops who landed further north at the Anzio beachhead, all sand dunes, sunken ravines and swamps, pinned down for months by German artillery and dog-eat-dog raids, could themselves push on. End of the war in sunny fuckin’ Italy.

  Only at Cassino there was a mountain, high, straight up, looming over the town and with a Benedictine monastery stuck on the summit, commanding the entire terrain and fully garrisoned. Around it or inside it were – a moot point – crack paratroopers. As an observation post it was an artilleryman’s dream, and for the infantry set to take it, a nightmare.

  They just couldn’t take that hill or its monastery. No matter how hard they tried. Troops sown all over the slopes in rocky defiles and hidden gullies. For months. Assaults, frontal and sidelong, attritional and full-on, all failed. Finally, in February 1944, they bombed the shit out of it. Destroyed it. The Abbot and monks had been warned and were evacuated, taking their treasures with them. The town had already been bombed. A ruin for a long time. The Germans had moved into it. And into the ruins of the monastery, for sure.

  In the middle of March we were pulled in, around the town, on the adjacent hills, strung along ridges, bivouacked near the river at the plain, and readied for what would be the third – and the last, we hoped – Battle for Cassino. If only the rain would stop. Had to stop if the bombers were to do their stuff. To flatten outright the entire town or whatever in uniform lived, breathed, shat and lurked within it. Then, on a Wednesday morning, the rain finally stopped. The planes came. They came in waves for an hour. When they left all was different, and nothing changed. As yet. Nothing is false in this account of mine. But everything is wrong. It is like looking on back at it as we looked at it then, but then was different. Not because we were waiting our turn to die and that the fear of it was a real taste. A taste of what, I do not know – some secretion of bile I suppose, not felt or tasted since, anyway. More because – my disdain for the recollection, I mean, and it is this I want you to see, if not to comprehend – it wasn’t me that it was happening to, because none of us were us any more, not as we had once been. We had become other. You had to if you were to survive. Bodily, yes, we survived, not simply by avoiding madness by all kinds of pretence of normality – sharing whatever we had, from jokes to letters and news – but by being other. I am saying that we who had seen what we had seen and done what we had done were no longer the same, what we once were, what we wished to be again; and, believe me, we never would be. I knew I was a killer and they could justify it, as could I. Yet I was not; it was this other who did these things and wished that Wednesday morning for more killing to be done – much more – and not caring if it ended, whatever that end now was, since none of it could end until I could come back. As myself. And besides, in Cassino town, there were no civilians left. Only Germans. Nazis. The enemy. To hell with their names, their faces, their pasts. Let them have no future after the bombs fell. But they did.

  In the town, there would still be Germans. When we went in at last. Dug in. Pillboxed. Tunnelled under. All this in the ruins of what had been the centre of the town. Reinforced positions, encased by concrete, in what had been palazzos and hotels. Tanks sunk deep up to their hulls in lobbies and hallways. Not destroyed at all. Waiting for us, to beat us off as they had done those like us before us, for months on end in the cold and the rain, from the winding river to the battered town, from the marshes of the sodden plain to the hairpin vertical roads twisting and corkscrewing through the scrub and the rock to the monastery still waiting to fall, the constant sight and menace above everything.

  The monastery was just visible to us as we waited in our lines. Its remains still looked down above the dust and wind-borne debris rising from the final destruction of the town. It already seemed to matter less than it had to us fools who believed that what had been promised had been delivered, handed to us on a plate, the plate of the little smashed-up town just to our north. The flattened and obliterated town.

  Below the ruin of the monastery and three hundred feet above the town itself was the site of an earlier ruin, a medieval fort on the knoll of Castle Hill. It was a salient, a station, a jumping-off point which we were to capture like the town itself, all before the last push on up to the monastery. We all knew the drill and as the bombs stopped, precisely at noon, and the final softening-up artillery barrage commenced, our tanks began to fire up, to rumble into the ruins with us, the infantry, to follow in their unstoppable wake.

  Tactics had been spelled out. To fulfill their oh-so-fool-proof strategy. Objectives in the town to take and to hold. The sweep through the lower town to the rail
way station, then beyond, out onto Route Six and the plain opening out to the north to Rome. Castle Hill secured and held; then troops to go further up in the lee of the monastery, overwhelming the shell-shocked defenders. Victory.

  Tactics that would be a piece of cake to carry out. Almost nothing and nobody could have survived the destruction that we had seen rained down on them for an hour. That is what we had been told. It was what we believed – what we wanted to believe, anyway, when low-flying bombers kept winging in and releasing their loads, shitting flame and explosives as we cheered. It would be a mop-up operation. Unstoppable tanks. Indomitable infantry. All objectives reached and secured by late afternoon. Yeah, sure.

  But by nightfall it rained again and there was no moonlight to guide us amongst the jumbled landscape of wreckage and ruins where we had fought all afternoon for footholds, not strongholds, against an enemy who had risen up to meet us. An enemy who still existed. A hidden enemy, an unseen enemy, who had emerged, pocket by pocket as our tanks and troops entered into their line of fire, set up to slaughter us. From the redoubts they had made of cellars. From the shelling platforms they had disguised and protected within the recesses of the thick-walled stone dwellings and buildings of Cassino. Coming out, in ones and twos and platoons, from a network of tunnels. From crannies of rock reinforced with roofs and walls and set amongst the stony granite paths of the hillsides. Amidst the mound of hillocks of rubble, from blasted-out window embrasures and from doorways without doors, from behind piled-up masonry and iron and steel, as snipers, deadly and fleeting. With hand-held rocket launchers and hand grenades, machine guns and rifles, and with shells directed from the monastery, they killed us at will. Our tactics were dead for us even before they could be employed. The bastards had survived, able still to defend against us in what had become a defender’s playground.