The Baghdad Railway Club(35)

I turned into an alleyway, and saw a camel’s head on a pole. It stuck out from the front of a shop made bright by unshaded lamps and white tiles. In it sat two Arabs conversing pleasantly amid a litter of bloody camel parts. I saw two other camels’ heads further along, signifying another couple of butcheries. In fact it seemed this street was given over to the selling of camel parts just as certain quarters of any town in Blighty would be given over to the selling of motor-car parts. The heads put me in mind of one of my daughter Sylvia’s toys – hobby horse. That was a horse’s head on a stick, and it too looked pretty glum about it. I thought of the four weeks’ voyage that separated me from Sylvia. That was if malaria didn’t do for me, or cholera, or the ferocious Ahmad, or Shepherd and his associates (if any). In the ordinary military sense, I was safer in Mespot than I had been on the Western Front, only it was too hot here. It didn’t do to dwell on the fact, but I could hardly breathe.

I saw an alleyway going off, its name neatly and newly painted on a wall: ‘Clean Street’. Captain Stevens had come here earlier in the day – to number 11. That spot had also been marked on Jarvis’s map, and I hadn’t had the chance to ask him about it.

Clean Street was only clean in comparison to Dead Camel Street. I walked along the dusty, broken cobbles to the last building, which was long and low, with arched windows of dusty glass, yet it seemed as if I was seeing only the tops of the windows, as though the building had been pressed down into the ground. There were two doors, both painted with a number 11, and one of the two stood open. It gave on to a stone staircase, which took me down to a further door, and from beyond this came the sound of a rapid whipping, and a desperate groaning. I pushed at the door as a cockney voice within roared, ‘What’s your purpose, John? What’s your purpose?’

My eyes roved over a vast, echoing basement packed with boxing Tommies. Well, Tommies and sepoys both. There were three boxing rings, and shirtless men in white shorts either scrapping in the rings or milling about in between, or hitting at punchballs, or skipping, which accounted for the whipping noise. I looked at one of the skippers, and he doubled his speed, commencing a kind of dance into the bargain. It took me a second to realise that a horn gramophone was playing American music – all shaking drums with a band of lunatic trumpeters trying to keep up. The walls were green tiles, shining with sweat, and hung with home-made banners. I read ‘51st Sikhs’, ‘53rd Sikhs’, ‘2nd Leicestershires’. Clouds of steam somersaulted through the unbreathable air. The place was evidently connected up to a generator, for it was lit by crude electric lamps that would flash occasionally – or had I blinked twice in disbelief?

A rather faint voice behind me said, ‘You are to sign in first, sir,’ but I paid it no mind. The man who’d been roaring ‘What’s your purpose‚ John?’ was now down to ‘Purpose, John! Purpose!’ He was an instructor at the ring closest to me. One fighter – the purposeless John, who was taking a pasting – wore leather headgear to soften the blows and save the brain. These were a new thing in boxing and my governor in the railway police, Chief Inspector Weatherill (a champion army boxer in his day), was dead against them. The other bloke, the one handing out the pasting, hadn’t bothered with one.

‘What are you, sir? Welterweight?’ said the instructor. He wanted me in that ring – wanted to see an officer get bashed. ‘Get stripped off, sir, and you can go against the southpaw.’ As I stood stunned, he roared out ‘Two minutes!’ and the pair in the ring resumed their scrap.

A southpaw was a left-hander, I knew that much. But in the flurry of the scrap, it was the devil of a job to see which man fitted the bill. ‘That bloke’ll be your mark, sir,’ the instructor said, seeing my difficulty, and indicating the meaner-looking of the two, the one without the helmet, ‘Irwin – the little machine-gunner.’

At this, I started. ‘Machine-gunner? What company?’

‘Eh?’

I indicated the ring. I was pretty sure neither fighter had yet clapped eyes on me. ‘The southpaw,’ I said, ‘the machine-gunner. What company?’

The answer came back slowly. It was quite a mouthful, after all:

‘Irwin, sir . . . he’s in the 185th Machine Gun Company. I know that, see, because I’m in the 186th.’

I hadn’t exactly been clutching at a straw. There wouldn’t be more than a dozen or so machine-gun companies in Baghdad.

‘Kit’s over there, sir,’ said the instructor, ‘in that room by the little blokes.’