Story 1 by Anthology

Author:Anthology
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 9781909844186
Publisher: Parthian
Published: 2014-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

ACTING CAPTAIN

Alun Lewis

The detachment was a very small one, a single platoon sent from the battalion to guard the dock gates and perimeter, but they had a bugle. Acting Captain Cochrane, the detachment commander, had indented persistently for one, and after two months’ nagging on his part, DADOS had grudgingly coughed up a brand new one. It was hanging over old Crocker’s bed in the fuggy blacked-out Nissen hut in which the administrative staff were sleeping. There was Crocker, an old soldier who had served in Flanders, Gallipoli, India, and the Far East; he was the cook, Acting Lance Corporal, C3, and used to it. Next to him Taffy Thomas was snoring; the air had grown slowly thicker and more corrupt with fumes from the stove, last night’s fish and chips, cigarettes and beer, and all the coming and going since black-out time on the previous evening; so you couldn’t breathe it into your lungs without a snore as it squeezed and scraped past your uvula. The fire was still flickering under a weight of grey ash and cinders in the stove.

For no apparent reason Crocker woke up, groaned, yawned, pushed his dirty blankets off, and sat up, vigorously scratching his thin hair. He was wearing his thick winter vest and long pants with brown socks pulled up over the legs so that no part of his flesh was showing except where the heel of his sock was worn through. He listened a moment, to discover whether it was raining; then, finding it wasn’t, he unhooked his bugle from the nail above his head, turned the light on to make sure that the office clock, which he always took to bed with him, indicated 6.30 a.m., put out the light again, shuffled to the door, spat, breathed in, closed his lips inside the mouthpiece of the bugle, and blew reveille. He found he was blowing in E instead of G, but, after faltering an instant, laboured through with it in the same key. It was too dark for anyone to notice; not a streak of grey anywhere.

‘Gawd curse the dominoes,’ he grumbled, shuffling back to his bed. He shook Taffy Thomas hard, relishing the warm sleeping body’s resistance.

‘Get up, yer Welsh loafer,’ he shouted in his ear. ‘You’ll ’ave the boss on yer tail if you don’t get down there wiv ’is shaving water double quick. Get up. You ain’t got yer missus besidejer now.’

Taffy didn’t get up as philosophically as Crocker. He was still young enough to resent and rebel against things the old cook had long ago ceased thinking about. Most things were a matter of course to Crocker; air raids, sinkings, death were as normal as cutting rashers of bacon in the dark and peeling potatoes in his ramshackle corrugated-iron cooking shed.

However, Taffy got up. He put his hand on his head to feel how hot his hangover was, and then in a fit of irritated energy pulled on his trousers and pullover and searched about for his razor.

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