now aswirl with red, white and blue bunting – Walter imagined the
sergeant’s hearty hand on his shoulder, and the weight of the King’s shilling
in his pocket, and the moment of bursting through the door to his mother’s
kitchen and flinging his coin on the table and announcing, ‘I’ve enlisted! I
signed up with Kitchener’s army!’
He pictured all of this as he stood in that line – and pictured as well the
pharmacist’s daughter’s delight if she were to see him in khaki – but what he
failed to anticipate was the obligation on every new recruit to submit to a
medical inspection, so when he arrived before the sergeant and saw a group
of men disrobing behind a single, inadequate screen – his own father among
them – and realised that he too would be required to strip naked under the
gaze of that room full of men, many of them also unclothed, and none as
young as he was – with tattoos on their biceps and forearms, and body hair,
and darker fatter penises, such as his father was now displaying – his courage
deserted him and he mumbled an apology, confessed to being under age, and
turned and hurried from the hall.
Which was the first and only occasion on which Walter Barley disobeyed a
command, the sergeant calling after him to come back at once, to come back
and be a man.