In 1915 I got my first Blighty leave. I stepped off the train in Brighton, in a uniform still splattered with mud from the front, surrounded by Tommies just as muddy but all carrying rifles.
I’d heard stories of men returning home earlier than expected, finding their wives or girlfriends messing about with some man in essential work and putting one of the King’s issue bullets into each of them. The whole affair hushed up and the soldier sent back to the Front.
I visited Jack and Ted’s wives to deliver the final letters, wedding rings and other stuff, including the photographs taken in Rouen. I substituted my copy of the photograph for Ted’s. Mine was crumpled and muddy but his was stained with blood.
Both wives were working to make ends meet. Jack’s wife was a tram conductor, Ted’s was working as a dance teacher three afternoons a week and as a hostess in a dance hall in Gloucester Place for two evenings. Men paid fourpence a dance and she got a ticket for every dance they had. At the end of the session she got twopence for each ticket. She was a pretty woman and I regretted I wasn’t much of a dancer.
I stayed in Brighton for my leave. Every day on the seafront I could hear the sound of the big guns across the Channel; distant booming in the bright blue air.
Brighton was the recuperation centre for men who had lost limbs during the war. Hundreds of men thronging the promenade without legs or arms, in wheelchairs and on crutches. Those who had lost all their limbs were carted around in big baskets. Basket-cases they were called.
On my last day of leave I was walking down near the West Pier by the bathing machines when the guns started up again. There was a gang of limbless men huddled together near the gents’ toilet. One with no legs perched in a wheelchair; several with one leg and crutches. They were watching the young women come out of the machines with their buckets and spades. The girls screeched and giggled as they paddled into the cold water.
I threaded between the sailboats drawn up on the shingle between the huts.
‘Someone’s copping it,’ I said to a man with no arms. He ran his eyes over my stained uniform and gave me a nod. He saw me looking at his empty sleeves.
‘I had to go into no-man’s-land to cut a bit of wire,’ he said. ‘So that our major could show it to his old woman. I knew the idea was she would be so proud of his bravery she would let him have a bit of grummer.’
‘“Grummer”?’ I said.
‘That’s what some Irishmen call the “blow through”.’ I still looked puzzled. ‘Sex, man, sex.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘I hope he’s like me, and when she’s on her back waiting for him to up her, he won’t be able to get a hard-on.’
He spat next to his polished boot. I nodded to him and walked on, past barrows loaded with herring, twenty-four for a shilling. They stank but it was a better stink than I was used to.
I was thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit of grummer myself, but wondered if I’d be able to manage.
I stepped aside for big, lumbering horses pulling carts piled with tradesmen’s wares and a coal cart pulled by the biggest horse I’d ever seen. I was surprised these animals weren’t at the Front.
On the King’s Road there was a hubbub. Khaki-clad troops marched by, their uniforms spick and span. I heard someone say that the fresh-faced youth at the head of the march was Prince Edward. They were singing Sussex by the Sea and then Tipperary. I looked back at the group of limbless men and shrugged.
Someone screamed and I looked around, then up. There was a Zeppelin, cutting lazily across the sky. It was too high to see the crew leaning over to toss out the bombs, but I saw a dozen or so explosives drifting through the air before they plummeted sharply, growing larger as they fell to earth.
The explosions were loud. The sound bounced off the tall buildings. Ten minutes later I reviewed the damage. The Grand Hotel had taken a hit and a tram had come off its lines. A motor car swerved by it, throwing up dust on the dirt road.
The hit on the Grand would cause panic right enough. I’d been in there the day before for afternoon tea. It was stuffed with people who had left London for fear of air raids. Members of the royal families and the aristocracy of Britain and Europe rubbed shoulders with theatre and cinema stars, wives of bankers and industrialists, profiteers and more obvious London crooks like the Sabinis, who ran the rackets at the racecourse.
Most German Zeppelin attacks on the coast had been in the east, in Suffolk and Kent. German warships had shelled the east coast. In consequence, those people taking holidays flocked to Brighton rather than Broadstairs.
I thought about going out into the country, maybe down to Black Rock. But I also had the address of a brothel. It had been given me by a man who died beside me at Le Couteau. He joined up in 1912 at Preston barracks, just outside Brighton. His father had taken him there when he turned sixteen. His father had kept the shilling his son was paid as a new recruit.
He was with the Second Sussex. He told me he was a virgin but he’d been given this address and on his first Blighty leave he was going to see to that. He died an hour later without ever knowing a woman.
I looked across the road at the slums that came right down to the sea. I could find some girl in there who’d do it for a penny and a tot of gin but I was mindful of disease.
Ted’s wife had asked me if I’d go to see a friend of the family, who was invalided up on the Ditchling Road in a school converted into a hospital. She said he was very low. A grenade blast had caught him, splintered his right arm, blinded him in his right eye; crippled him.
I went there now. It continued to be a hectic day. There were a lot of men in the hospital coughing up their lungs from the poisoned gas. More Zeppelins soughed over, bombs falling out of the sky. They were trying to hit the munitions factory in Hove. I came away not knowing which of us had tried harder to be cheerful.