In The Green Tree by Alun Lewis

Foreword written by Owen Sheers

November, 1942

I’ve got a little while before I plunge into a sweating hold to see that a piano accordion sing-song is in progress, and then up to the wireless cabin for ‘On Board Tonight’. I’m in my hot little cabin and I thought I’d be alone but in come Tudor and another batman called D.O. Evans who is known everywhere as Bugger All Evans! They pretend they’ve got work to do in our cabin but really it’s simply to have somewhere less unbearably sweltering than the crowded hold in which they are forced to exist – what places they are! The bunks piled high to the roof round the hatches and on the hatches, men like maggots playing the old soldiers’ gambling game ‘Housey-Housey’ and the croupier shouting the number in a voice like a bull.

Hammocks, beer bottles, oranges, bare legs protruding from shirts, sweat and smell and foetid warmth. And we’ve only just begun!

November, 1942

I don’t know whether to dive in or stay on the bank and concern myself with tanks only. At least I considered both courses, but the insatiable humanist and the restless writer in me will probably impel me to abandon neutrality and seek in India as in England the true story and the proper ending.

November, 1942

[South America] It’s 8.30 a.m. now, but you’re having a hot lunch and how I wish I were there, with the rocking chair and the settle. Is Bombo living with you now like a good little husband? Or has he still got the call of the wild in his whiskers? But here is a wide lagoon with a hard ochre-coloured beach and peaked mountains running south to the end of the eye, with coloured houses and onion-towered churches lining the steep green cliffs with their red soil, polished date palms, the smell of paraffin that exudes from the calm oily water and lies heavy on the stairs and in the cabins and even in the artificial ventilating draughts, the native boys in their brilliant little surf boats paintedbanana yellow or crimson or sea blue; and all the motley ofour march through the streets two afternoons ago while theship was taking water before we slid out into the bay towait for movement orders.

Oh, we had a huge parade through the streets. The locals were a little frightened at first. Then they realised we were British troops and they flocked like flies along the roads. We marched past the Governor in the main square, a beautiful garden of bamboos and lime and acacia and palms, and the black women mingled with the yellow and the white, cheering and making gestures of various meanings. In the doors of hovels naked babies with huge bellies and navels like eyes crowded and flapped their hands. Old shrivelled women made V-signs from their chairs, and all the girls with their pointed heads and thick lips, black frizzy hair and white teeth and eyes, clad in cheap glittering yellow or red American cotton frocks, danced and waved and dived into our marching threes to shake somebody’s hand or give someone a fresh green orange or a new banana.

It was a strange riotous day. We came back in the dusk, with the thick green trees glowing lucently in the warm street lamps, with the doors of the cathedral open and all the profusion of baroque statues and golden altar clothes and burnished rails lit up by clusters of candelabra that fell also on the white frocks of the kneeling women. And all the flickering street advertisements like Piccadilly Circus, and the marines drunk and merry and the girls standing on the corner of the street of brothels. It’s marvellous to see such a mixture of race and colour as in this melting-pot; they looked very healthy, though not as Amazonian as one might have expected.

In the evening they had a reception and my pet colonel A— met the dignitaries and discussed the world. The governor’s wife made a speech in English, which she scarcely knew, praying that we all return unscathed soon, soon… and she burst into tears. So we evidently pleased our new planet.