An excerpt from Alan Sillitoe’s The Widower’s Son, WH Allen London 1976, pp 111-14

In the last few days he’d forgotten such things, and fell to brooding on how many men and guns they’d lost, though even that didn’t take away the image of Nicole stripping off her cotton step-ins in that dimly-lit bedroom with its walls of blue-flowered paper.

He stared beyond the narrow line at the first green water-streaked land of Flanders. The British always swore terribly here. Military police shunted them parallel to the main flux, and his gritty eyes opened by looking at the flowing grass and nondescript red-roofed cottages. This is not me, he said to himself, trying to ease Oxton’s boots from his feet. And then: this is me – before scrambling from the gharry to lie in the tadpole ditch till the Stukas had gone. They concentrated more on the coast – luckily – because the plain must have looked as if it were crawling with ants. There were too many to blast everybody. Visibility was fair over the flat land. It was dry and warm, and they were slowed by crowds the closer they got to the Channel.

The burning lorry was heaved off the road, bullying Redcaps cursing blue murder at the chaps till it was done. The wounded lay patient enough. They’d have to wait till someone got them out of it. He felt his spirit wearing away as the truck pushed [N] orth. He’d been primed full to bursting by that last quick firing from his twenty-five pounders. He only wanted to be back on them with unlimited ammunition.

It blackened his heart to realise they had no more guns, not knowing where the next piece was coming from. Maybe they’d dish up a few obsolescent garrison shooters when they got to England, or send them off on some forlorn stunt as footsloggers. The back wheel kicked up a stone. A gunner would rather lose his life than his gun, but they’d been told to spike them and that was what they’d done.

He felt as if he’d been a whole lifetime married to those guns, and now he was exposed to any stray German who might come along in his tank or roar down from the sky in his deadly toy plane.

With the heat of the engine and so many bodies it was an effort to keep the eyes open and the back straight. He answered the chaps’ questions as if he were God Almighty and knew all the answers, when he really was no wiser than a babe just born. Keep the brain clear for all queries, tactically mature, strategically adept. But he wasn’t made for a retreat, having been btrained and mentally built to stay in behind those lovely guns till they blew up in his face, or he was shot dead by the first enemy to get close.

Better to die, but orders had to be gulped like acid. You perished if you stayed. You rotted when you left. An artist cannoneer and master gunner couldn’t give up his guns and be the same man ever again. Yes he could. In five minutes he could if he got another gun. But he half dreamed in the heat that he was still with the guns: flesh dissolving with their hot metal when all was split asunder in some final violence, and buried under the soil without apparent trace, staying till the sweet steel corroded, and his dead flesh twisted around it and rusted, and together they melted till nothing remained but God’s clean soil.

When he shook himself, he was a mile or two closer to the sea, which he imagined he could smell above the odours of petrol and sweat. The superlative technical education on which he had prided himself, and in the glorious light of which his father would live forever, hadn’t prepared him for the fact thatwithout his guns he’d feel as primitive as an ape.

He felt shame at registering such emotions, and wondered whether Watkins was equally clawed by their loss. Nobody had liked what had happened but, as they’d often reminded him in a friendly or jocular fashion, they had different backgrounds and attitudes, and so took it in a more philosophical way. Perhaps they didn’t think much about it, looked more towards the future than the past. but by pondering brutally on what had happened he might learn something. Certainly he would rather perish than lose his guns again. Such a thing couldn’t be allowed to happen twice in a gunner’s lifetime.

All kit and tackle had been chucked on to a heap, and blown up at the last minute. They had what they stood up in, and what was inside them. Oxon had amassed presents for his mother. ‘Never mind,’ William said.

‘It’s all right, sir. It’s me she wants. I’ll explain to her. But I’ve still got a French handkerchief. Bought it in Amiens. Real lace. It doesn’t weigh owt, and it takes no space up. Not much bigger than a stamp. So she’ll get that. She loves things from France, sir. I had some beautiful stuff in that suitcase, though.’

They made their way towards rising heaps of smoke. He killed the future by letting each minute roll by under its own steam. He felt that they were driving into a holocaust, but he looked around calmly.

They queued by the East Mole He could never understand why some were blown to pieces and he was all right. But a soldier stops craving to understand such things.

It takes too much time and concern. You’d never solve it, anyway. If you try to puzzle it out while the bombing is going on, you might destroy the sixth sense that seems to be protecting you. Question things, and you get killed. And if you want to puzzle it through in safety, it’s even more impossible because your senses have fo,rgotten what it was like. So you end by calling ist fate or Kismet, or just plain good luck. In any case, it takes too much time to figure things out. And time, as his father had always said, was of the essence.

At Dunkirk, he couldn’t have been more right.

WITH THANKS TO RUTH FAINLIGHT & FAMILIES

John 🦘🌏🌍🌎☢️🔥🌐

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