WEE CHARLIE’S WORLD
by Bryce McBryce
Smashwords Edition 2009
© copyright Charles Bryce 2006
First published Darling Newspaper Press 2006 in paperback (print edition isbn9-780959-063042).
mailto:danpress@optusnet.com.au
PO box 176, Kalamunda, Western Australia 6926.
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DEDICATED to brats, then and now, the children of serving personnel, the children history ignores.
Says Charlie: "The hardest thing to learn is people."
O
Brat Overboard
SMALLER than a kitbag and only four years, the youngest in that army, Charlie watched the soldiers come aboard: pith helmets, khaki shorts, puttees, boots, bolt-action rifles.
He knew that the din of embarkation at Southampton Docks would take him to a faraway place where, according to Mum, the Empire’s warriors would defend a far-flung outpost. He little suspected, nor could anyone imagine, perish the thought, that he would be a more immediate problem than militant Japan.
Being an army brat, Charlie was part of the human baggage, born into the ranks of the British Raj at its peak. The monarchy had survived the tumult of Edward and that scandalous Simpson divorcee, although Charlie was too young to heed such affairs of state.
He was licking salt from his lips and dipping greedy fingers for more peanuts from the packet passed down by his father, whose own fingers were hard from close working with artillery parts. Charlie munched happily and observed. Today was a day of new tastes and resplendent sights aboard the troopship that would steam a mighty fighting force, and himself, across the world.
The expertise of Charlie’s low-ranked dad, and the Colonel’s eager duty, was to build big protective guns in the Far East.
Thoughts of crisis, if any occurred to these men, were restricted to political considerations a world away from this speck of a boy, but, two days out, crisis came in vast proportion, in the Bay of Biscay, where watery mountains rolled at the French coast as if bent on swamping all Europe.
“We can’t find Charlie anywhere!” Excited children ran along the boatdeck. “He must have fell overboard.”
This was alarmingly credible, given the ’s tendency to roll. Hasty departure had left its new-launched hull minus stabilisers. Only the day before, a sudden extreme tilt had sent families tumbling to the deckrail in a tangle of chairs, bags and humanity, and then back again screaming to the rail opposite. Before it happened, Charlie had been blissfully enthralled in the antics of Bimbo the Cat within an Enid Blyton comic. Afterwards he was grateful that adults were fat and heavy, for they had toppled past him as a brick will overtake a feather, to provide a cushion at the gaping fence he would otherwise have shot through to the ocean.
He had been safe then and was safe now, while alarmed adults called his name with increasing urgency. He was hiding. In his secret place, they would never find him, tee hee.
As grownups and children searched, he curled tighter inside a folded deckchair that sported blue and crimson stripes. Little for his age, like many a kid growing up in the city soot of industry, he had squeezed between two sheets of canvas to leave hardly a bump.
Secret and silent, he was determined to stay here until the dread moment of discovery, should it ever come, because this was the serious challenge of hide-and-seek.
The yodels and screams of the past half-hour told him all the others had been caught. He was the last and they had no idea where he could be. Nobody had explained to him how the rules of the game applied to this particular detail. He was always one of the first to be nabbed, until today. Ruminating on this unfamiliar endgame, he decided the proper thing to do was stay hid till got.
“Where did you last see him?” Mum was interrogating his brother who replied, being three years Charlie’s senior: “I told him not to go near the ship’s rail.”
“Why didn’t you watch him?”
“That’s not allowed. I was it. You have to close your eyes and count to one hundred.”
A seven-years-a-mother groan reached Charlie’s ears. He held his breath in case Mum heard him breathe, she was that close.
The folded deckchair leaned against a metal bulkhead, its occupant invisible, its observers unsuspecting, and Charlie day-dreamed while the adults formed gangs to begin their own systematic seeking. Rugs, knitting, books and deck games were abandoned to this serious business, which whirled outside Charlie’s canvas cocoon without disturbing him.
The thoughts that came to him were neither of salted peanuts nor Bimbo the Cat. He was imagining the thick green landscapes of Ceylon, as avidly described to him by brother Bob.
“It’s all jungle is that place Ceylon, which means the trees are all close together and the grass grows way way up over your head. And they have snakes, nasty things that bite you on the foot if you’re not careful.”
Charlie knew elves could be nasty, and there were bad fairies also, but snakes he knew not.
“See this dragon.” Bob had been holding up Grimm’s Fairytales, Illustrated Edition. “That’s like a snake ’cep snakes are smaller and can get under your toes.”
To the land of fairytales, then. Perhaps giants would appear but Dad could handle them. Hadn’t he told Mum that day, coming into the kitchen after work, “Giant problem, darling. The guns have to go on a clifftop with steep jungle blocking access. There’s no road at all, says the Colonel. To carry up the gun parts he’s promised me coolies and elephants.”
The Colonel: intangible as God. He was the boss who told Dad what to do and, according to Dad, knew as little as Charlie about guns, which was why the Colonel needed a staff-sergeant who had graduated from the Royal Woolwich Academy of Artillery. You couldn’t be cleverer than Dad.
Guns made a mighty noise and fired great hunks of steel and frightened the enemy and could sink ships from a distance too far to see. And Dad knew how to build them better than anyone. Charlie giggled. Dad was not so clever at finding a boy snucked into a folded deckchair.
“For godsake.” Just beyond the canvas, Mum was sobbing now. “Go up to the bridge and tell the blessed captain.”
“But we’re not sure. Nobody saw him fall.” That was Dad, trying to stay calm.
A stranger’s voice, a man, joined the debate. “They won’t turn the ship back to search, not if nobody’s sure.”
“Of course we’re sure,” Mum snapped at him. “He’s not on deck.”
“Perhaps he climbed down a ladder,” suggested the other.
“We’ll have to search the whole ship,” Dad declared.
“Let’s alert the Colonel.”
“No, I’m going straight to the captain.” Dad again. “The skipper’s rule is absolute on board a ship.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Mum.
The concerned stranger offered to call for a delegation. “The captain’s more likely to take notice if there’s lots of us. Let’s say, three staff-sergeants and your missus. Come on, there’s no time to lose.”
Charlie stayed silent and unseen, tee-hee.
SHUT AWAY in the peace of First Class, in the Officers’ Lounge, the Colonel remained unaware of the deckside riffles of panic.
He was ensconced beside his gin-tonic, his thoughtful pipe, his sombre wife doing crochet, and his copy of Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac, the rare and glorious edition immortalising Derbyshire’s hard-earned victory in the English county contest. The troopship ploughed on, towards its war destiny.
Beyond the firmament, the battle god Mars gave a chuckle and winked at Neptune, who wiggled his seaweedy crown and went on stirring divisive tides and anticipating fun interesting as, if less spectacular than, Moses parting the Red Sea. While the gods thus enjoyed these people-doings, their favourite diversion, up on the bridge of the Dilwara the captain peered ahead at dancing canyons of the deep, aware and conscientious.
On this its maiden voyage, his vessel was the magnificent pride of a superpower, and the biggest responsibility of all his watery experience. It could hurl the King’s brigades across the globe to distant pink possessions, or bring them to speedy invasion of shores coloured green or yellow, or any other hue the mapmakers chose to denote who-owns-what in the atlas of imperialism.
The lack of his stabilisers had sharpened the old-salt’s maritime temper and he was therefore alert for further omens of mischance. His clipped query to the First Officer squeezed through greying whiskers. “Has there been an albatross?”
“Not yet, sir, only seagulls.”
The captain pointed aloft, fuzzily displeased. “That’s no seagull. Look at the forked tail, pointed wings.”
“Could be a tern, sir, but it’s not an albatross, and definitely not a German eagle.”
“They go underwater. A U-boat hits without warning. And we’ve no guns on this ship, no protection at all.”
“But, sir, no war declared yet.”
“Just keep a sharp lookout.” The captain’s own eyes gained a patriotic glaze. “With well over a thousand troops as cargo, the whole future of the Empire is upon our shoulders. England expects.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The First Officer saluted before turning his seablue gaze to the sun-kissed horizon, seeking albatross, icebergs or a telltale periscope.
The captain of this particular maiden voyage was forgivably anxious, because his very career, his advancing pension, could depend on a safe and timely crossing to Asia’s latest hotspot. Spain was in flames, Nazis rampant in Germany, Fascists gripped Italy, and tyrannical generals threatened France, yet all the alarms of Europe were nil compared to the plight of far British colonies on the doorstep of belligerent Nippon.
At the corner of his rheumy eye, a three-headed blob intruded into the azure expanse of ocean, and it was neither demon albatross nor predatory submarine. Startled observation identified to the captain a human threat bunched for entry, namely three men in khaki, grim non-officers from the Dilwara’s nether barracks.
“Lock the door,” he blurted, but already the first and shortest had pushed through to confront him, followed by two hefty companions and, pressing at the rear, two agitated women.
“Child overboard!” yelled the smallest soldier. “You the skipper?”
Bracing his bluebacked shoulders and attempting to tower, the captain released a titanical sigh. “I am he.”
“My nipper’s gone missing, mate, you’d better stop the blasted boat.”
There came a supporting female wail. “Turn back. You’ve got to search.”
“I cannot, madam.”
“You must, it’s my Charlie.”
Never had this captain, nor his First Officer, faced a mutiny, and this was close to it: soldiers and their women telling him where to steer his ship.
One of the bigger men, pugnacious of face, was examining dials and knobs on the brass panels of command, right there within finger reach. “Where’s the rudder thingy?” this invader snarled. “How does you do a about-turn?”
The First Officer, arms wide, darted to become a fleshy barrier. “Don’t touch. There’s nothing can be done if someone’s in the drink. No chance of rescue. Too late now anyway, even if he can swim.”
“Charlie can’t swim, you tar-brained fog-wet.” The determined little mum tried to get past to a large red handle. “That’s why you’ve got to fish him out.”
It was a difficult situation for the man in charge, who knew his English history and realised that even a king had bowed to forceful underlings demanding something called a Magna Carta. Ship’s captains, however, have been moulded by the elements to think fast in stormy seas and this one was well up to scratch. He turned to his First Officer. “Get the Colonel. He’ll know how to handle this rabble.”
“I’m no rattle, I’m Charlie’s mum, you barnacle,” screeched the more desperate of the women. She was still grappling with the captain when the Officer Commanding Troops came panting into the conflict.
Having abandoned his comfort zone and his Wisden’s Almanac, reluctant as a basking crab plucked from its reef in a placid lagoon, he now found himself a victim of verbal floodtide. Almost in unison, the declarations came staccato:
“Charlie’s missing,” howled the small woman.
“They can’t find Charlie,” said Shorty.
“Charlie’s disappeared,” said Pugface.
“I believe Charlie’s gone overboard,” said the captain, while the First Officer, doing his best to allay the tempest, stood to attention and announced quickly, “But not an albatross in sight, sir.”
The Colonel stiffened his jaw, in the manner recommended in army manuals for holding fast before concentrated enemy artillery. The hairs of his moustache stood rampant, and he asked in his punishment-parade voice, “Who the blithering blasted blazing heck is Charlie?”
He was smouldering, but he was tolerant, called to umpire a tricky howzat. He listened, therefore, while the situation was explained by half-a-dozen excited appellants, then he gave his verdict.
“The word of a ship’s captain is absolute. Regulations are emphatic on that point. Whether to proceed, or to bring the vessel about, is his decision alone. I cannot, I will not, interfere.”
World history would undeniably have been different had Pontius Pilate encountered a dissenting voice from the mob similar to that which now hit the Colonel’s ears. “What about my Charlie? He’s your decision ’cos he’s in your army. Tell Greychops here to quit flouncing and do the flaming obvious. We’re Brits and we don’t leave kids to drown when they fall overboard. You tell him, go on.”
Charlie’s dad also had his say then, gulping. Paternal duty had clearly overcome traditional acceptance of his colonel’s ruling.
“Customs of the sea, sir, are all very well, but we’re Army and you outrank this squid because you command fighting men, ’undreds of them. What’s more, them ’undreds won’t let Charlie drown for want of a effort. And I’ll be ’appy to alert them if you can’t. Sir.”
Detecting the trigger-happy tone, a certain germ of mutiny, the Colonel summoned a reinforcing growl. “I’ll put you on a charge, that’s what I’ll do. Court-martial, that’s what. Insubordination, that’s what. There is no turning back. I’ll hear no more.”
But at this critical moment he did hear, along with the rest of them, a screech from the boatdeck followed by celtic cussing and, “Bejasus, the crafty wee devilmonkey scamp.”
The scene below was dramatic as any miracle, and it included the laying on of hands.
One hawkeyed mother, still searching, had spotted a yellow speck of wool, Charlie’s elbow. She was now hauling him out by a boot, then a twiggy arm, then a tug of hair, and finally, as the group hurried down from the bridge, Charlie entire.
The Irish wife gave him a whack before pushing him to his mum for another whack and fierce hugs.
Charlie took his smacks with the thin-lipped dignity of a martyr who stands happily upon smoking faggots. They did not hurt, they could not, for he was in a radiant daze, the kind that comes so rarely in Life’s challenging marathon.
Many times, and especially at birthday parties, had he engaged in such games as chase, blindman’s buff, pin-the-donkey, statues, musical chairs, hunt the thimble, snakes-and-ladders, ludo, and various inventions of the older children. The difference today in the challenge of hide-and-seek, and the cause of his facial glow, was that he was the winner. For the first time ever.
ONE CROWDED HOUR OF GLORIOUS LIFE IS WORTH AN AGE WITHOUT A NAME. - Thomas Mordaunt.
O
The Holy Coconut
FROM GARRISON COMMANDER. To all personnel.
Military Intelligence identifies Fort Frederick as the intended target of a bomb attack by the terrorist Mutulingam. All Officers, NCOs, Other Ranks and Dependants are urged to maintain an alert watch and to report suspicious strangers, especially of the native variety, or any unusual happenings, to the Duty Officer Of The Day.
By Order, Officer Commanding Fort Frederick
CHILDREN raised in a fort where centuries of battle and massacre have bled will absorb from its wallstones an urge to contend, and so it was in Fort Frederick, built by Ceylon’s first invaders from Europe.
The Portuguese imperialists made use of the stone blocks remaining after their righteous demolition of a large Hindu temple, and the fort had in the fullness of time and warfare become British army headquarters in Trincomalee, and Charlie’s home.
The army’s mission was to defend the harbour, but the children of that army engaged phantom enemies among the crumbling bastions erected 400 years earlier by Admiral Lorenzo D’Almeida.
Old-fashioned cannons stood rusting, the citadel was occupied by serpents and cockroaches, and the ancient ramparts gave easy points of ambush.
“Hoi, give us a coconut,” yelled the brats who regularly accosted pilgrims wending to the site of the ransacked temple ruins. “Hoi, give us a coconut,” parroted Charlie, who followed where the bigger boys led.
Without fail, they whooped warlike against the devout, who came twice a week to worship at Swami Rock, a clifftop thumb where once had stood The Temple Of A Thousand Columns.
The worshippers danced along with ash-smeared faces, incense, flowerpetals, fire, and fruit for their god. They shooed away the urchins while praying as always, the rite of centuries, to Siva the Destroyer.
They snubbed shrill pleadings from these foreign imps who claimed to appreciate, even more than Siva, the tasty milk and meat of a coconut. Only scowls and growls met this suggestion, and an occasional raised elbow.
Fiercest of the incomers was the terrorist Mutulingam. He had disguised himself as a devotee by painting a third eye, glaring white and vermillion on his corrugated brown forehead. He had also disguised his bomb, as a fat green coconut.
Mutulingam’s face resembled a spiderweb, gnarled and scarred as it was by devious plots and desperate actions. It had scrunched in delight when he derailed the Colombo express; it had felt the flames (from safe distance) in his blazing destruction of Trinco’s post office; and it had twisted in glee at the many severed bridges his plots begot.
His fellow locals often paid physically, even fatally, for the excesses of this psychopath, but it bothered him not. In Mutulingam’s book of dark deeds, the end justified the horrors, and today his end was to blow up the fort’s commander, that stick-nosed peacock of a Colonel.
Charlie spotted the man with the spiderweb face and kept out of his way. Though young in years, he had viewed enough B-movies to recognise a baddy.
An older boy named Gerry, who imagined himself a cowboy, transferred similar cinemagoing experience into strategic wisdom by declaring, “We’ll head them off at the pass.”
Charlie knew the place he meant and scrambled as rearguard up a narrow gravel track, eager as a Navajo brave anticipating covered wagons to plunder, and no cavalry within shooting distance.
Siva’s chanting acolytes, and the bomber hidden among them, came unsuspecting, bearing offerings of scented petals and chubby coconuts in wide baskets of woven palmleaf.
These containers were balanced upon two or three heads while other men and women sang, jingled finger-bells or traipsed barefoot in a colourful crocodile of saris, sarongs, bangles and garlands. The perfume of their heaped flowers preceded their advance through the trees.
Scenting the approaching prey, Charlie lay concealed in tangled jungle, one of six raiders, breaking cover only when his fellow desperadoes darted into the sacred throng. He jumped and reached arm’s length, and again, but for him the coconuts were too high within those broad baskets on the tall brown heads.
Then one of the baskets tilted as its bearer skipped to avoid a rushing boy, and the nuts cascaded. The pilgrims halted in dismay, then scurried to gather up their fallen gifts to the god. Charlie grabbed and ran, trophy gripped tight, elated by that peculiar joy only victory brings.
Minutes later the reckoning arrived, at home.
“Where did you get hold of that coconut?” Mum demanded, when she saw Charlie and his brother Bob hurling it against the concrete verandah in a bid to smash it open.
“From a man going to Swami Rock,” Bob truthfully replied as spokesman, being three years older.
“Did you thank him?”
Shake of heads.
“Well, remember your manners next time.”
When Dad came home at lunchtime he showed fuller and fiercer knowledge of the coconut, for he grumbled, “I was hauled before the Colonel today. What have you two been up to?”
“Nothing, Dad.”
“The Colonel is upset. He said you were annoying the Swami Rock procession.”
“We only asked for some coconuts.”
“He said you attacked with sticks, so you could tip their baskets.”
Guilty silence. But Charlie realised a stick would have made toppling the baskets easier. Apparently one of the older brats had thought of that.
“I took the coconut off the ground,” Charlie said.
“After someone knocked it from the basket?”
“Well, yes, no, I mean the man tripped.”
“Stay away from those people,” Dad grunted. “Unless you want me court-martialled. That’s an order, boys.”
He had been regarding Charlie’s trophy as he spoke, and now pointed to a mark painted on the smooth green husk. “That’s a swastika. The nazi emblem. Bring it here, there’s something queer about this nut, and the Colonel did refer to the Swami Rock pilgrims as a security risk.”
The detested German ikon could not be mistaken. Large and bold and red, it covered one whole side as if Hitler himself had claimed the nut as booty, or as a portent of future territorial gains.
“Today a coconut, next year all Asia.” Dad squinted at one end, shook it, listened to it, frowned, and then applied his artillery lore to guess what might be inside. “Look, it could be dangerous,” he told Mum. “What we
Mum rolled her eyes. “And our two were bashing it on the concrete.”
“Lucky it didn’t go off. There’s a frightful tick from inside, and the top has been tampered with. See this cut going all the way round? It’s like a lid.” He knew better than to attempt opening it.
Mum clucked, an alerted hen. “Quick, you boys, take cover. And please, Jock, get rid of the awful thing. Be careful, luv.”
With a gritty nod, teeth clenched, Dad held the nut at full stretch before him and walked, slowly and carefully, to the foot of the garden. “Keep the kids behind something solid,” he shouted back. “I’m going to find a bomb disposal bloke.” The era of the common household telephone had yet to dawn.
Certain other inventions, however, had been around for ages. The technologies introduced from Europe had, over 400 years, evolved Ceylon Man to an advanced pool of intelligence, into which the local nasties dipped with glee. Dissidents who once relied on club, sharp stick or bow-and-arrow had marched with civilisation to such modern aids as gunpowder and the timing device.
In particular, the villain Mutulingam had progressed from his childhood tantrums to become top-ranked fiend in the anti-British movement. He was at that moment lurking down the garden, having traced his stolen armament to this particular bungalow, where two junior imperialists had been abusing it so recklessly. It was essential he recover his bomb, so cleverly smuggled into the fort, and intended as the Colonel’s spectacular exit from it.
At the approach of the shortish soldier bearing the coconut bomb, the scum from the focused all three eyes, the painted one creasing his brow, and kept himself hidden in the shrubs and bided his time. This was going to be easy.
Back on the verandah, Charlie was peering also, having ducked behind the ice-chest that kept family groceries in an edible state.
Mum and Bob had sped in separate directions to warn the neighbours. Charlie spied the skulker, and instantly recognised him as the baddy from the Siva parade.
“Watch out, Dad,” he yelled. “There’s an ugly hiding in that bush.”
Alerted as he stooped to deposit the incendiary device a wise distance from the bungalow, Dad looked up to see the contorted face, like a weird tropical growth, blooming from a screen of leaves. “Cumeer you,” he invited the shadowy form.
This familiar phrase, ominous to all illegals, caused Spiderface to flee. Dad went after him, determined to apprehend and question the prowler.
Beside a bed of smiling zinnia daisies, the deadly coconut remained, awaiting attention in due course from the fort’s nearest equivalent of a Bomb Squad, a pair of sappers from Royal Engineers. This outcome, however, did not eventuate.
Charlie was still watching his dad chasing the scoundrel down the road when Amanda Tuttlestone, who lived next door, came skipping home from Bible Class, fair curls crowning her glow of goodness.
Despite the Colonel’s frequent urgings, Charlie’s parents had not yet enrolled him in the Padre’s tutoring, preferring to strive along a more individual path. Civilised behaviour, they reasoned, was better learnt at home, within range of a quick cuff.
Although only one year older than Charlie and not much taller, Amanda considered herself far higher in Heaven’s estimation, and here in Charlie’s garden was the proof of it. Her saintly expression twisted to a frown at sight of the fat green sphere. She looked up, spotted his head poking from the icebox, and her scowl vaporised to indignation.
“Shame on you, Charlie, shame, shame. You’ve been with that rough gang again. It’s a sin to rob the pilgrims, Charlie. You stole their holy coconut.”
“No, I didn’t. It fell into my hands.”
“You’re a liar, Charlie.”
“Put it down, Amanda.”
“Tell fibs and the Devil gets you.” Holding the nut between her palms, she shook it with force, then grimaced at the painted swastika. “There’s a sacred squiggle here. That proves you nicked it from the Siva dancers. Well, I shall just give it back to them, so there.”
She tucked the nut beneath her guiltless elbow and strode on, past her own house and up the hill. Charlie ran after her.
“Come back, you don’t understand, Amanda. It’s a bomb.”
She looked back, yet marched on. “You can’t fool me, Charlie. I know a swiped coconut when I see it.” She recalled words of chastisement from that day’s scripture reading, “Thieves never prosper. Repent, Charlie, repent.” The horror on his face pleased her. She quickened stride as he rushed in pursuit.
“Honest, Amanda, that’s a bomb. My dad left it down the garden while he went for help.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
He lunged for the nut but Amanda dodged, sprinting and wriggling into a tangle of undergrowth. She was slim and fast and he found himself outdistanced. For a girl who went to Bible study she was surprisingly athletic.
Guilt and remorse descended. Charlie felt he was to blame. When the bomb exploded, as surely as tock follows tick, everybody would realise his terrible crime, his father would be court-martialled and the Colonel would order painful things to be done to Charlie. He had to stop Amanda, somehow, before it was too late. In desperation he kept on her trail, long and arduous though it soon became.
Determined to evade him, Amanda circled back and round and among the ancient bastions, while Charlie followed, anguish swelling. Eventually, being a thinker, he thought it best to abandon the chase and go straight to Swami Rock. This had to be Amanda’s destination, for it was there the Siva worshippers performed their ceremonies.
If gods look down, as sages claim, then one was feeling, if gods feel anything, a jealous admiration for Charlie’s progress.
As every Hindu knows, and Charlie didn’t, Swami Rock was where the demon king, Ravana, had built his palace and imprisoned the bride of immortal Rama.
It took an army of monkeys, a giant eagle and several years to bring Rama and rescue to the summit, yet Charlie was getting there in swift minutes. Unlike Rama’s faithful bride, the ticking coconut was not going to wait.
Charlie had learned that monsoon drains, in the dry season, make good if dirty shortcuts. These and other secret paths, familiar from months of play, sped him up the fabled slopes, where only startled jungle creatures noted his unorthodox passage. Panting onward, he wondered if Dad’s chase after Spiderface had met better progress than his own.
Voices ahead, English voices, slowed Charlie to a cautious creep. He was finally at the top, where residents of the garrison rarely ventured, so the English words meant that something unusual was going on. Reaching the edge of a jungle patch, he stayed out of sight.
There was no sign of Amanda, but the Siva worshippers were there among their sacred fires and scattered garlands, along with a businesslike platoon of tommies.
Bayonets fixed, the soldiers had herded Siva’s followers into a tight group before a mound of coconuts and were briskly boot-hopping about this pile of gifts intended for Siva. Each and every nut, dozens of them, had a red swastika painted on its smooth outer surface.
“Keep searching.” The Colonel’s angry rasp, close by, outsounded throaty rumbles from the Hindus as steel blades shovelled the offerings, prodded and pricked, polluting their deity’s feast. Charlie looked for Dad, who surely had alerted senior command to the bomb, yet Dad was not there.
“This should have been done at the gate.” The Colonel was berating a long-bearded ancient whose orange robes denoted both piety and officialdom. “It’s a nazi plot, old chum. Can’t have the enemy tricking us by using you holy wallahs, eh-what, do you understand me?”
“Not making plot, good sir.” White whiskers and skeletal arms flagged assurance, the face firm and innocent as treebark. “This mark belong Siva. Very holy.”
“We’ll see about that. I can identify a swastika any day, and you’ve got scores of them here. The damn Germans have infiltrated your followers, old chap. Lucky for us, however, British Military Intelligence is on the ball.”
“No ball we are bringing, good sir. Coconuts only.”
“And a bomb. We got a tip-off, see. There’s a bomb here somewhere. If it is not found among the coconuts, then you will all have to be searched.”
From behind his tree, Charlie now spotted Amanda’s bright curls on the other side of the clearing. She was beside a boulder, sitting on the bomb, yet too distant to hear the Colonel.
She seemed reluctant to emerge to the bared bayonets and the agitated commander, as was Charlie himself. Scared, yet aware of his duty, he forced himself to approach the Colonel.
“Every blasted pilgrim must be frisked,” the Colonel was insisting, haughtily fingering his upper lip fuzz. “One of you could be concealing the bomb under his sarong.” He hesitated. “Or a woman’s sari.”
“Amanda’s got it,” said Charlie, pointing to the boulder she was hiding behind.
“Eh, what, howzat?” The Colonel glowered down, seeing just an interfering grubby brat who looked like he played in stormdrains.
“Amanda took my coconut, an’ she’s sitting on it, an’ I told her about there’s a bomb, an’ she won’t listen, an’ she’s hiding behind that rock, an’ . . .”
“Go away.”
“But you can see for yourself. I chased her all the way up here, ’cos she wants to return it.”
The Colonel growled. “This is no time for games, m’lad, and you should not be here. So hop it.” He turned to a fresh-faced lieutenant. “Frisk them, Jenkins. The women too.”
Whitebeard whimpered his alarm and young Jenkins gaped dismay. “Sir, they get stroppy, sir, if we touch their women, sir.”
“Then go summon female reinforcements, you ninny.” The Colonel flared his bushy lip. “Show some initiative, man. Send for the Padre’s Wife and that native woman from the cookhouse and Sister from the Sick Hut. Jump to it, smartly now, hup-hup.”
Charlie reached up and tugged the Colonel’s shirt sleeve, then was unable to say what he meant to, because the action instantly tipped a bucket of wrath.
“You again!” The moustache began to jitterbug, the eyes were like swollen boils. “You . . . you . . . Sergeant, get this brat out of here.”
Charlie fled. Back behind his tree, intimidated, he watched the Colonel push aside the protesting swami to address the worshippers directly, in slow simple English words. The few who understood passed on his information, erupting a chorus of hisses and grumbles.
One woman threw an overripe mango but was restrained by others as it spattered the Colonel’s longsocks. The verbal crackle of dissent continued, however, increasing after many minutes when two female searchers arrived.
It was obvious to Charlie that both had been doing something else when summoned. The Padre’s Wife, apparently dressed for her daily pony ride, appeared in a red jacket, jodhpurs and riding boots. She was stately in build, while her riding helmet and whip suggested some superior rank in the British Raj. The captives moaned.
At her heels came Cookie from the mess hall, who in quiet time between meals had been chewing a spicy of the juicier kind. Her lips and chin were stained with bloodlike betelnut.
Upon her broad bosom, being a Christian, there dangled a large crucifix of the god demonstrating tortures such as spikes through hands and feet and great thorns piercing the head. The captives wailed.
“You line them up, Cookie.” The square-jawed huntswoman slapped her crop against the flared jodhpurs. “Chop, chop, ladies, over here. Let’s get down to business.”
Cookie waved a soup ladle she had brought along and began arranging the women into a loose rank for the search, every bump and cranny to be inspected.
Undecided what to do, Charlie simply watched. So did Amanda, puzzled yet patient, and a third secret watcher observed the proceedings with muttered contortions of his spiderweb face. Eventually . . .
“Everybody groomed and passed fit, Colonel.” Saluting with her whip, the Padre’s Wife confirmed the absence of hidden bombs among the women. Lieutenant Jenkins, giving a more traditional salute, declared likewise for the males. “Whatever happened to the bomb, sir, it is not among these people.”
Sister from the Sick Hut, having failed to help the search, arrived in time to point out that Hitler’s swastika was also an ancient and respectable symbol used in most Hindu rituals.
She was a Brit who took an interest in native customs. Blinking through huge lenses anchored in tortoiseshell, she began enlightening the Colonel and his men.
“For their religious ceremony, gentlemen, this sacred emblem was daubed on every coconut here. It has nothing to do with the enemy, it is merely a seal of quality and freshness, for the attention of their Lord Siva. In this regard I can cite various differing theories as to the efficacy . . .”
“Thank you, dismiss.” The Colonel waved her away as once again he addressed the whitebearded swami. “Look here, grandpa, you may now resume your jiggery-pokery. Carry on with the mumbo-jumbo, savvy?”
“Please first you go away, good Colonel sir.” The security shenanigans had not dented the old man’s umbrage, and he let it show. “Your warriors make a blot upon the holy spirit of our blessed Lord Siva.”
“I am glad you have noticed that, because the rule of Britannia outranks and overshadows him, blot, blot, you savvy? All the same, fellow, since everything here is now secure, I shall withdraw my men and let you carry on, howzat.”
The soldiers marched away, the Colonel offered the Padre’s Wife and the Sister sherries at the nearby Officers Mess with its imperial views to the horizon, and he tossed Cookie a five-rupee note.
The Siva rituals continued near the cliff edge, where lay a smooth square rock like a table. Anchored from it and pointing to the sky was a rusty spear around which the faithful began chanting.
OFTEN had Charlie surmised that this blade, observed frequently during his fortwide rambles, served for human sacrifice, but now as he moved towards Amanda he saw that it was simply for husking coconuts.
The orange-robed guru was on the stone tabletop, his ankles thin and wobbly but steady enough to give support while his stringy arms received coconuts, one by one, from his congregation and smashed them down on the spike.
Red swastikas flashed in the sun and the burst innards trailed from split skins as the worshippers hurled their sacrifice down to rock-toothed waves and thus, presumably, to Siva the Destroyer.
Amanda caught sight of Charlie’s sneak advance towards her and emerged from hiding. At the same time, Spiderface stepped from the undergrowth and rejoined the pilgrims, who greeted him with queries and hot accusations.
“Where have you been?” they appeared to be demanding.
“What have you been up to?”
“Ruffian! Was it you caused the soldiers to come?”
“You are a disgrace to Siva.”
Spiderface shrugged his contempt and sneered at them, and Charlie realised the villain had escaped Dad. Should he run home and announce where the brute had got to?
“Yoohoo, folks.” Amanda strutted towards the rocky altar, eager to give back the coconut before Charlie could pounce. “This is yours,” she called to Whitebeard, her palms a tray for her offering. “Some nasty boys pinched it from your procession, and I am returning it.”
Pinched by nasty boys? The terrorist stopped sneering and shouted something. Up beside the sacrificial spear, Whitebeard’s face hosted a duel between fury and fear, and fear won by a mile.
With a yelp of panic, he did a leap defying his years and found refuge at the rear of the gathering. From here he yelled a public alert while Amanda pursued him, determined to complete her good deed.
As she came on, the crowd retreated before her. “But I have brought back your coconut. Stop. Here it is.”
When their backs met impenetrable jungle, making withdrawal from Amanda impossible, the pilgrims pushed Spiderface roughly to the front, gesturing that he take the horrid thing.
Gestures soon became punches and kicks, until Spiderface held up his wrist bearing an expensive watch. This he pointed at while urgently shaking his head and flicking bunched fingers to indicate a thing that goes boom. Time up.
Now everybody began screaming at Amanda. Shoo, girl, shoo.
“Oh well, if you’re not going to take it.” Bible Class had taught Amanda to do the right thing, always. “I shall deliver the coconut direct to your god.”
She hurried to the stone altar and clambered up, one eye on Charlie who was still stalking her. Repeating Whitebeard’s example, she raised the coconut above her head in order to bash it down on the spike.
“Amanda, no!” Charlie grabbed her ankle from below and hauled himself on to the rock.
The faithful of Lord Siva the Destroyer watched entranced as the two white children fought for the deadly coconut.
Both scamps tumbled from the altar locked like battling tomcats. Lucky in the fall, Charlie was able to snatch the nut. He ran to the clifftop and threw it with all his strength.
The green missile soared, hovered, and then fell to the ocean. It plopped beneath the water, and there was no explosion. Siva the Destroyer received his gift without a burp, gently taking it to his bosom in wet and silent dignity.
Or perhaps rejecting it, Charlie wondered, for who can guess the whims of a god?
From the humans, however, there was no uncertainty, in united yammers of wrath.
“Now you’ve done it, Charlie.” Amanda pointed to the spike. “The nut was supposed to be split open first.”
“If Siva can’t open it he’s not much of a Destroyer. Anyway, that was a bomb like I told you. Hittin it on the spike could have blown us skyhigh.”
Roars from the pilgrims jerked Charlie to new panic, but he was not the cause. Nor was it the mishandling of their holy coconut. They were setting upon Spiderface.
Bruised and scratched, daubed with ashes from their fires, a hasty swastika painted on one cheek, he was being hoisted above their heads in an ominous march towards the sacrificial spear.
“Stop that, you naughty men,” lisped Amanda and was bowled out of the way. Charlie decided to run for help to the Officers Mess.
As he sped from the sacred arena, he met the Colonel coming the other way, also the Colonel’s lady guests, all responding to the uproar.
Spiderface owed his reprieve partly to the longwinded protocol of the rituals, being mumbled by the guru beside the spear, but more dramatically to an advance like heavy cavalry by the Padre’s Wife. “Desist, you blighters!”
Many paces behind her, the Colonel huffed and a loping sentry from the Mess fired a rifle into the air. The Siva faithful dropped their victim untidily, bouncing Spiderface on the stonework with only a ripped sarong, beside the spear instead of impaled upon it.
Whiteboard windmilled his hands while making resentful noises to the Colonel. “That man is evil-evil. He big terrorist, he Mutulingam. Why you deny Lord Siva?”
“He must stand trial.” The Colonel’s forefinger preened his military lip, then wagged. “That is the law, old chum, the British law, you savvy.”
“Is good, stick him now with your British bayonets. We shall pray us all while watching.”
“Sorry, old chap, it doesn’t work like that. Formal proceedings are mandatory, the British way.”
Calm washed across the bark face and there came a gap-toothed grin. “So British tradition, sir, we like that. You fire him from cannon.”
“Not quite, old chap, not exactly.” Turning in dismissal from Whitebeard, the Colonel leaned down between the Padre’s Wife and the Sister, who were kneeling over the terrorist. “Gotcha,” he gloated. “Get up, you filthy swine.”
“Much thank you, Colonel sahib. You save my blooming life.” The terrorist got to his feet, bright and beaming as sunshine after a monsoon deluge. The Colonel continued to glower.
“We saved you only so we can hang you in a decent manner.”
“No, no, not, I am innocent fellow. Blessed pilgrim only.”
“You are a terrorist. A bomber.”
“No, no, not. Where is evidence?”
“Your coconut bomb,” the Colonel crowed. “We have nabbed you red-handed.”
“What bomb is this? I have no coconut, I have no bomb, I am seeing no bombs anywheres.”
The Colonel turned to Charlie. “You, boy, where is the bomb?”
It was Amanda who replied. “Charlie chucked it off the cliff.”
A strange rash invaded the Colonel’s face. “Charlie?” He said it like a whispered calamity he had heard of before. “Did you say Charlie?”
“That’s him.” She pointed. The Colonel said a very rude word, and the terrorist with the spiderweb face walked free.
That same day, as a security precaution, the Colonel gazetted an order barring entry to Siva’s faithful. For the first time in 40 thousand years, the Swami Rock was banned, leading to clamour and rioting in the town of Trincomalee.
To Charlie, all this was simply the adult world performing its mysteries, compounded when Dad came home to tell Mum that native community leaders and the Commissioner of Police had jointly petitioned the Governor of Ceylon, who chided the Colonel and lifted the ban.
Dad laughed in the telling, adopting a Governor voice: “Mustn’t upset the locals. It’s not the done thing.”
After this, the Siva pilgrims resumed twice-weekly entry to the fort and to the inevitable nuisance of the brats’ ambuscade. But, strangely, Mutulingam’s campaign of arson and murder throughout Ceylon came to an end.
Charlie noticed one day that the pilgrims bore several lumpy brownpaper parcels among their coconuts, and he wondered at the red stains, like betelnut, that seeped out to blend with the swastikas.
Spying from his secret place at Swami Rock as fierce old Whitebeard husked the coconuts, he saw these bundles cast over the precipice too, a bonus for Siva.
He did not link this mysterious offering with the disappearance of Spiderface, yet the whole adventure left him puzzling. Here was a revelation to ponder: Religion was a most peculiar thing, for it could also be so nastily unholy.
THE INJUSTICE DONE TO AN INDIVIDUAL IS SOMETIMES OF SERVICE TO THE PUBLIC. - Junius.
O
Boo Britannia
THE rift between Fort Frederick and the convent was based firmly on divergent philosophies. Whereas the fort owed to warfare its creation and healthy upkeep over the centuries, Saint Mary’s preached opposite beliefs just as ancient, the spreading of love and peace. To this abstract separation was added a geographical one formed by flat green recreation grounds, the fort’s protective field of fire.
The two opposed institutions co-existed happily, equally established and revered by their respective followings, until the Colonel realised the need to educate the children of his garrison.
He decided that the convent, being the nearest school, was just the place to honourably incarcerate Charlie and the other brats, whose riotous exploring of the old fort was disturbing army routines and thereby demanding too much of his precious time.
Charlie was underage for the Primary curriculum, yet he had been tormenting the Colonel’s concentration more often than that officer was able to bear and stay sane. For this reason, when the Colonel sent a request, which was more a command by the Occupying Power, that St Mary’s Convent School For Girls should take in boys from his establishment, Charlie’s name topped the enrolment list.
The Colonel was hoping, even praying, that the Catholic nuns might thrash some discipline into a brat he believed to be recalcitrant as Tokyo.
Charlie, of course, had never heard of recalcitrant and could not spell it if he had, and only vaguely was he aware of adults discussing potential and distant enemies like Emperor Hirohito. As for discipline, he always tried to obey, Fate and Circumstance allowing.
The good women of the convent realised this instantly and instinctively, and there was never a nun who considered, even in the white heat of disaster, taking a switch to this curly-mopped wide-eyed cherub. They all loved him. Doting admirers included the Mother Superior herself, a walnut-faced donna with expressive eyebrows, who insisted the Army pay full-fee in advance, no haggling.
She was of worthy colonial stock, having inherited steadfastness from her Portuguese ancestors, who came centuries before with the first white soldiers, and she tempered this basic essence with native Sinhalese gumption.
The Colonel agreed to her terms, the brats arrived at the girls’ school as day-pupils and were sorted and distributed according to age.
Charlie found himself immersed in an interesting brown multitude chanting a loud chorus. “One times two is two, two times two is four, three times two is five, uh six . . .”
He had learned already that his fingers numbered ten, and he could count his toes also, ten again. Counting was an important skill to be mastered if a boy was not to be disadvantaged by a big brother dividing a chocolate bar or a bag of sweets, given by adults who carelessly urged, “Share this with Charlie.”
Now, singing times-tables each day, Charlie learned you could go up to 12 and even beyond, although these shadowy higher figures failed to claim his full understanding.
For now he was content to warble his first numbers with new friends in neat attire, seated at age-stained wooden desks, each child supplied with a slate on which to scratch simple sums or A-B-C. There was always something new to learn in Charlie’s world.
His full years, now approaching five, from birth to this desk in this convent, had fashioned him as a thinker and, just as there always were fresh wonders to discover, there was also a constant flow of ideas to ponder.
“Charlie doesna say much,” his Glasgow granny had remarked in the months preceding overseas posting. “He just plays awa at the thinking.”
Today his thinking had begun with the daily story. For the fifth morning since Charlie’s induction, Mother Superior had entered the classroom wearing her black robes, wrinkles and mobile eyebrows to relate the doings of an unusual kid named Jesus.
Charlie liked stories, especially the fairytales Dad read aloud at bedtime, yet in these convent stories Jesus, a wizard, did not kill giants or rescue a princess.
For five days of Mother Superior narrative, Jesus had done nothing particularly exciting at all. It was pleasant all the same to sit in half attention while the gentle voice droned into his ears and out again among the many brown ears of his companions, all of them girls from far homes beyond the British Army.
Charlie gave no thought to any variations of skin colour. People came that way, different, just like flowers and vegetables, birds or animals. Jesus, however, was peculiar and puzzling and not to be accepted without doing a bit of quiet reflection.
Mother Superior related how Jesus had two fathers, named God and Joseph. None of Charlie’s friends had two fathers, at least not at the same time. Mind you, with adults one could never be sure of anything. They would spring surprises and marvels when it was not even your birthday or Christmas.
Adults were altogether strange. Charlie had so far identified three main kinds.
There were Cross adults who wanted to scold everyone. You could tell from their faces. There were Happy adults like Mum who smiled a lot even while telling you off. And there were Closed adults who ignored Charlie if he spoke to them. His dad, his one dad, could be classified as all three kinds, depending on what Charlie had been up to.
“You’ll get me court-martialled,” Cross Dad said quite often.
Without knowing what this meant, Charlie knew it was something bad from the way Dad spoke, and yet the only court known to him, where his parents played tennis, was a happy place. The adults there wore white clothes and hit a ball and let Charlie have one to kick, provided he kept off the court.
“Charlie, what is it you are seeing out that window?”
Interrupting his thinking, Mother Superior had a Cross forehead, and yet was already registered in Charlie’s mental ledger as a Happy, because she gave hugs and never smacked.
“Are you paying the attention, Charlie? I see your face with a look upon it that says your thoughts are far from this classroom.” Giggles bubbled around the room where the girls, one year older, had come to regard him as a rather amusing mascot.
“I was thinkin.”
“And of what were you thinking, Charlie? Deep indeed must be these thoughts to send your gaze away from the blessed Lord Jesus and out of the window.”
“I was thinkin ’bout that story what you’re telling. How can a boy have two dads?” More classroom titters.
A twitch skittered briefly across Mother Superior’s textured cheeks before she found her saintly smile. “It is like this, Charlie. One of these two fathers I am telling you about is in the Heaven. You see, we all have a holy father who is in the Heaven.”
“Where’s that?”
Pointing to the ceiling, Mother Superior suppressed a wobble that was now invading her smile. “Way, way up there in the sky.”
“That’s jus’ where I were lookin. Out the window an’ way-way, but I didn’t see any Heaven.”
He wondered if Heaven might be a British colony yet. Most places were. All the world was British, Charlie’s whole life was British, even when it came into contact with those many things that were different, like the children of Trincomalee from non-army homes, and dusky nuns who dressed in black curtains, and a lad with two dads at the same time.
“How do you get to Heaven?” he asked. “Do airplanes take people there? How many people live there? Have they got a fort? Do they play football? Are there any snakes?”
“We shall have a lesson on the Heaven another day,” Mother Superior declared from behind her gradually down-turning lips. “Now is time for morning break.”
CHARLIE cantered into the playground, still thinking, but not of Heaven.
His thoughts had taken a sharp turn into the warfare that would break out, as it did every day, when he ran to rejoin his brother and the other brats from the fort.
The day after their first arrival at St Mary’s, a serene haven amid the palmtrees bordering Trinco Bay, playtime had deteriorated into skirmishes that intensified with each succeeding day.
The walls around the convent, almost fortlike in their grey thickness, had been mossed by time to absorb the gentle notes of girlplay over generations, but were now in a tremble to alien battlecries.
There was total racial harmony in the playground, as in class, where no hatred was ever voiced for the children of the imperial masters of Ceylon. All should have been harmonious, too, within the schoolyard gardens surrounded by pink hibiscus and elegant ferns. Instead, there erupted an age-old, almost mandatory, brand of strife. Charlie knew well what was causing it. Boys versus girls.
The two white girls from the fort had sided immediately with the local girls against the six male interlopers, who readily fell into their instinctive behaviour, evolved since Adam blamed Eve over the apple.
Rowdy football disrupted the hopscotch, skipping ropes bound captured boys, half-nelsons throttled unwary girls, and the teachers raised their black-robed arms and lost-lamb wails to the sky and wept like a rainy day.
For two weeks, Mother Superior prayed, then sensing no help would descend from traditional sources she applied herself more directly to the problem.
“Your ruffians will please to leave my convent,” she told the Colonel who, as a goodwill gesture, had responded to her hasty message to visit her personally and urgently.
Her blunt request came immediately after having tea served to him in her office. Jesus looked on from a framed picture on the wall behind her desk, lending divine ratification to what could only be taken as a tirade, an item the Colonel was not used to receiving, not even from the General Officer Commanding Far East Land Forces.
“The Saint Joseph’s College For Boys has agreed to take them.” Mother Superior was announcing her accompli, a pre-emptive strike to stun superior force.
“These are not nice fellows, these wildboys you sent to us from your fort, but fortunately all the masters of Saint Joseph’s are experienced in the taming of wildboys. They will deal jolly well with your scruff-tuffs, hook, line and stinker.”
The Colonel sat amazed that any woman certified as a specialist in love and peace could summon such fierce movements to her eyebrows, and there was more coming at him from her quick lips.
“Your rough chaps, Colonel, will soon see the error of their brinjie-branjing. What is more to your notice, the fees are somewhat higher there at Saint Joseph’s. Of course and why not. We must render unto Caesar.”
The Colonel cleared his throat. “As you say, madam, exactly, umm. Perhaps, madam, it was a smidgen unwise on my part, well, the Army’s part I suppose, to expect a girls’ school to cope with boys.
“One can readily understand from this little incident why boys and girls have separate schools. We learn as we go, as Napoleon said on the retreat from Moscow, eh, what, howzat, heh-heh.”
Mother Superior glared, rattling her rosary, still holding an unmentionable memory of the recent day she had confronted Buster, age 7. The imp had spat at her: “My dad will come and blow up your bloody convent.”
No need to relate this to the Colonel. He seemed eager to show himself a reasonable man, and was already coming to terms with the new situation.
One might believe him desperate to not only school these rowdies but to get them away from the fort each weekday to someone else’s responsibility. Well, the Brothers at Saint Joseph’s would sort them out.
“As you have stated, madam, some revised clauses to our private little treaty seem necessary and I am the last person to deny such. That wouldn’t be playing the game, not cricket, what? By all means let us try this other establishment, this Saint Joseph’s. I know exactly what you’ve been put through. Army brats are difficult, and Charlie in particular is rather a prickly little handful.”
“Charlie? No, no, no.” The Mother Superior jangled her prayer beads again for emphasis. “Charlie we keep. He is a sweet child.”
“What?”
“He does not belong with the fierce boys.”
“What!”
“We love Charlie. He is no trouble.”