How Many Miles to Babylon?

Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper.

I noticed his feet before his face. In the summer they were bare, dust-grey and with soles obviously as hard and impervious to stones, thorns, damp, as were the soles of my expensive black leather shoes.

Occasionally they would heave themselves out of the water and follow her up the path, displacing the neatly raked gravel with their ungainly feet. She would turn and wave them away, clapping her hands softly together, to admonish rather than to alarm.

‘The earth is not your element, my loves. Go now. Shooshy, go.’

‘All I ever seem to do is boring Latin.’

‘Ora pro nobis,’ chanted Jerry.

‘Oh, hardly that. Boring Caesar’s boring Gallic wars. Your Holy Roman stuff would make poor Mr. Bingham faint away.’

‘They wouldn’t let us be friends.’

‘Why should they care?’

Yet I knew they would care. He was right. My mother’s mouth would purse up with disapproval, her voice rising alarmingly as it sometimes did when she spoke to my father.

‘Why is neither here nor there. Your lot would care. My lot too if it came to it. One’s as bad as the other.’

‘The Germans are going to fix all those eejits in Europe, the British are going to fix the Germans, and we . . .’ He paused for a moment and fumbled in his top pocket for a cigarette butt.

‘We . . .?’

‘Oh. We are going to fix the British.’

‘Oh, come on now. You dream.’

The rushes bowed to her as a little rippling wind stirred through them. A thousand thousand pikemen bowing.

‘With your pikes in good repair,

Says the shan van vocht.’

She looked round at me with disbelief.

‘Don’t. You never could sing anyway.’

‘The responsibilities and limitations of the class into which you are born. They have to be accepted. But then after all, look at the advantages. Once you accept the advantages then the rest follows. Chaos can set in so easily.’

All in all he seemed glad of my company, but in the same sort of way that a man on a desert island must be glad to see and talk to his own shadow from time to time.

‘Dulce et decorum est . . .’

‘I had hoped that when you grew up, my darling, I wouldn’t have to be lonely any more.’

‘I am sorry if I have been inadequate.’

[…]

‘Under other circumstances he would have been a more adequate man. I can’t bear to think that you . . . you will go, won’t you?’

Is hatred as necessary as love, I wondered, to keep the wheels driving forward?

How many miles to Babylon?

A strange thought for such a moment.

Four score and ten, sir.

It was the only thing in my mind. The strange bumpy rhyme that I hadn’t heard for years.

Will I get there by candlelight?

The orange leaves from the chestnut trees danced in front of us all the way down the avenue.

Yes and back again, sir.

‘You’re just another bundle in the White Man’s Burden.’

I laughed edgily. Sometimes jokes go too far.

‘Performing dogs. We’re neither more nor less. A slight crack of the whip. Sometime mentions the magic word, La Patrie, la Gloire, das Vaterland, Britons never shall be slaves, and the performing dogs all rush out and kill each other . . .’

‘If you give me the chance I will make soldiers out of you. Men.’

‘Catholic?’

‘No.’

‘You never know with the Irish.’

[…]

‘You are not, I hope, tainted with the Irish disease?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Disaffection. Disloyalty.’

Does it matter whose son I am? After all, it is what brushes off against us after birth that makes us what we are. That was what she had seen as she watched me growing. She had watched his giving and my taking. She too had to make her contribution.

‘It is people like you and Crowe who cannot see the wood from the trees who cause untold damage amongst those who see nothing at all. Those who must be led.’

‘Remember.’

‘I can remember nothing.’

‘The lake. The swans . . .’

‘Only that their wings sound like gun shots.’