Shadows of the Workhouse

charge of the billet opened the door, and the disorderly line of men entered.
    “New recruits, Corporal, and a bigger bunch of stupid bastards I’ve never met.” The staff sergeant turned to go. He turned to the men. “You wait. You just bloody wait. You’ll wish you’d never been bloody born, you will.” And with those pleasant words, he departed.
    I roared with laughter at this story. We both laughed, Mr Collett and I. Nothing binds people more strongly than the same sense of humour, and the ability to laugh together. I was thoroughly enjoying my evenings of sherry and an old soldier’s reminiscences. The British Army of the 1890s was not something I would have expected to find interesting, but in the firelight, with a good storyteller like my companion, the years came alive.
    I was also aware that Mr Collett had become deeply fond of me, which was touching. One of the pictures on his walls was of a pretty young girl in 1920s dress. I understood that this was his only daughter, who had been killed in the bombing in the Second World War. Perhaps I was becoming a substitute granddaughter to him. I didn’t mind. I liked him. He was a dear old man, and reminded me of my own grandfather, whom I had loved and admired deeply, and who had been more of a father to me than my own father. He had died a couple of years previously at the age of eighty-four, and I still felt the loss. If Mr Collett and I were both substituting another person into our growing affection, it was all right by me.
    He refilled my glass. “Do you like chocolates, my dear? I bought a box of Milk Tray this morning, with you in mind.”
    He reached up to the mantelshelf, and felt for them. I was still a bit chary about eating anything, because of all the filth around the place, and once, when he had produced a grubby plate of biscuits, which I had seen him drop on the dirty floor and pick up, I had said that I didn’t like biscuits. But an unopened box of chocolates was a different matter. Anyway, I loved them. After that, it was always sherry and chocolates. Incidentally, I never saw the bugs again, and after a while I ceased to look for them.
    “So you got to your billet, and your head wasn’t too bad. What happened then?”
    “We were told to make up our cots. A soldier sleeps in a cot, not a bed. They are constructed in two halves, the bottom half of which pushes into the upper half. This allows for more space during the day in the centre of the billet. The corporal showed us how to do it. The biscuit, which is a soldier’s straw-filled mattress, and two rough blankets, were folded on the top part of the shortened bed. We had no pillows, no sheets. Nothing fancy like that. The corporal told us the sip-but was on the landing.”
    “What on earth is a sip-but?” I interrupted.
    “Oh, that’s back slang for a piss-tub. There’s a lot of rhyming slang and back slang in the army. At least there was in my day. It may have been dropped by now.
    “I remember my first night very well. It was so new, so exciting, that I couldn’t sleep. Apart from which I still had a headache from the girls pushing me against the wall. My thoughts were racing – those girls, my mother, the recruiting sergeant, the staff sergeant, the station, the march through the night. I must have dozed off towards dawn and in my dreams I vaguely heard a bugle call. Seconds later the corporal burst into the billet, shouting: ‘Show a leg now, get out of it. Open those blasted windows and let some fresh air in. It smells like a bloody farmyard in here. Get out of it now, do you hear me?’
    “Perhaps I didn’t move, but the next thing I knew was that my cot collapsed, and I landed on the floor. The corporal had pulled the bottom half away from the top half, which was a very effective way of rousing anyone who did not leap out of bed the instant reveille was blown. This sounded at 5 a.m., summer or winter.
    “The corporal ordered us to dress and put away our cots and fold the biscuit and blankets. I was in a daze, but the roar of the corporal kept me on my toes. He kept bellowing on about the blankets not being folded straight, and how, he’d never seen such a useless, slovenly bunch of recruits, and how we would be licked into shape and no mistake. He ordered two men next to the door to carry the sip-but to empty it down the drains and clean it at the pump, where it would be left until the following evening.
    “‘Right now. Stand by your cots. This is only the