Anyway, my mother distrusted authority—any authority. She had no belief in God, loathed the church, and thought the army High Command little better than a bunch of brutish, emotionally stunted pigs, as intellectually vapid as a flock of geese (her very words). Men, she said contemptuously to anyone who would listen, make mistakes in life that women would never contemplate. When I left the house to join up she kissed me on the cheek but said nothing, not even “Good luck” or “Good-bye.”
My sister, Isobel, was different again. Two years younger than me, Izzy was the archetypal younger sister (or so I thought then), adoring of her elder brother, looking up to him, taking his lead in everything. I didn’t ask for it; she just grew up with her attitude without thinking. For me it was as much a burden as it was a pleasure. And it made me underestimate her.
I obtained a commission in the Forty-seventh Gloucestershire Rifles, based at Tetbury. As a second lieutenant—the lowest commissioned rank—I did a month’s officer training, and just three weeks basic training. There’s not much to say about Tetbury but, about half way through the course, we got a weekend pass and several of us took the train down to Bristol. Bristol was to play a walk-on part in my story in a number of ways, and the first time was that weekend.
I traveled with a couple of other second lieutenants; we had been primed by the adjutant on the general staff not to miss a certain “establishment” (as he put it) near the docks, called the Baltic Wharf, and to use his name. Not to mince words, the establishment, while a perfectly serviceable pub on the ground floor, turned out to be a brothel on the floor above. All was revealed when one of us, in ordering some drinks, mentioned the adjutant’s name. Apparently, the owner of the Baltic Wharf had been a company sergeant major earlier on in his life, and still had a soft spot for khaki. None of us knew whether we would be allowed out of the camp again before our training was completed, and it didn’t take a genius to see that, once we were in France, or Flanders, or wherever we were going, women would not be very high on the army’s list of priorities. Add to that the fact that each of us had had no chance to spend our pay for several weeks, and the Baltic Wharf began to seem like a little splash of color in a very gray-and-khaki world.
I remember that the girl was called Crimson—not her real name, obviously—and that she was from Halifax in Nova Scotia. She had lived in Bristol for some months, having been smuggled aboard a ship in her hometown in Canada to service the crew, then been too frightened to sail home, because war had broken out and the North Atlantic had suddenly become very dangerous.
The Wharf was a very civilized place for a brothel (at least, I imagine it was; I am not too qualified to speak, Munich and Bristol being my only experiences in that direction). Besides a number of bedrooms on the first floor, the Wharf had a sitting room, a place where you could relax, put your feet up, have a smoke and a drink, read the newspapers. It was quite clever in its way. The idea was not to rush the men away, once the main business was finished, so to speak, but to persuade them to linger, perhaps try another girl after a suitable break. Anyway, I was relaxing in the room, alone with a drink and a cigarette, waiting for the others I had traveled down with and leafing through that day’s Morning Post, when another man joined me. He nodded, poured himself a drink, and began to light a cigarette.
I was a bit preoccupied, to tell the truth. There was a piece in the paper about some of our ships being sunk off Ireland. Crimson wouldn’t be going home yet awhile.
Just then we heard a commotion below, and raised voices. A look of fear crossed the other man’s face and he rushed to the door. He stuck his head out, left it there for a moment, then slammed the door shut.
“Jesus!” he growled.
“What is it?” I asked. “Police?”
“No,” he breathed, more quietly now. “Worse. Curfew.”
“Curfew? It’s not late.”
“Not that kind of curfew. Enlisted men aren’t allowed by the harbor. Officers only.”