I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.
[ . . . ]
I invite my women readers to imagine how they would themselves have felt if, successfully disguised as a young man, they had been admitted to this closed and idiosyncratic male society in their late teens. For this is how I conceived my condition. The Army had confirmed my intuition that I was fundamentally different from my male contemporaries. Though I very much enjoyed the company of girls, I certainly had no desire to sleep with them, and the sexual ambitions which so preoccupied the minds of my colleagues simply did not enter my head at all. My own libidinous fancies were far vaguer, and were concerned more with caress than copulation. I suppose I was really pining for a man’s love. If so I suppressed the instinct: but as to my sense of gender, I knew it to be as different from that of my friends as cheese from chalk, or thump from serenade. I could not share the urgency of the male impulse, or the unquestioning sense of manhood which bound these soldiers together, and had carried them so bravely through so many ordeals.
You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting. Like a spy in a courteous enemy camp, or perhaps a dinner guest at one of the more traditional London clubs, you would find yourself caught up in the fascination of observing how the other side worked. For myself, I think I learnt my trade largely in the 9th Lancers, for I developed in that regiment an almost anthropological interest in the forms and attitudes of its society: and sitting there undetected, so to speak, I evolved the techniques of analysis and observation that I would later adapt to the writer’s craft. I felt myself to be, as you would, totally separate and distinct; for I realized by now how deeply a male sexuality lay beneath their conduct, and how profoundly I lacked it.
You would also feel a sense of privilege. It was like eavesdropping by licence. I am beginning to forget now what it was like to be able to sit as a man among men, and I shall never be in that position again: but even then I felt that I was lucky to have the experience. I was surprised that they should share their attitudes with me. In a curious way I was flattered that they accepted me. Sometimes nowadays I hear a party of men sharing a joke or an experience which, though not necessarily prurient, they would not think of sharing with a woman: and I think to myself not without a wry nostalgia that once long ago, in the tented mess of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, they would have unhesitatingly shared it with me.
[ . . . ]
It was fun for me, it really was, to enter the wider world in such company. Would you not agree? In Italy we first learnt the delights of wine, as of opera. In Egypt we sampled the society of cosmopolitans – that shifting, glittering companionship of the Levant which still set the tone of Alexandria, with its pashas and its panderers, its cotton knights and its Maltese entrepreneurs. In Austria we first encountered the central European culture of which my mother, who had been educated in Leipzig, was herself truly a product, and whose poems and music had filled our house at home. In Palestine we consorted with clever Arabs of Jerusalem, and were entertained to tea by embittered patriots. It was a far Grander Tour than ever the milords experienced, and we were still scarcely more than adolescents. Arriving at Port Said off our troopship from Italy, a friend and I went out to dine at a restaurant in the town. ‘Good Heavens!’ he cried, inspecting the wine list, ‘Rhine wines! How lovely it will be to taste them again after all these years!’ I accepted his enthusiasm with respect at the time, but considering it now I realize that he must have been about 16 years old when he had tasted them last.
Some of those evenings I remember with just the happiness, I suppose, with which a woman remembers her first evenings out with men, in the delicious gaiety of her girlhood. I remember for example the moment when, sitting with a brother-officer beside the window of a restaurant in Trieste, I saw two little urchin boys addressing themselves to us through the plate glass with the mummery of self-pity and appeal that was common then all over Europe – rubbing their little bellies to express hunger, wiping their eyes to simulate tears, holding hands to illustrate orphanhood, lifting their feet to display their broken shoes. They cannot have expected much from the well-fed young officers within, accustomed as they were to tips of a lira or two from the back of the hand, but on a sudden compassionate whim, which endeared him to me ever after, my companion took from his wallet some really valuable note, ten or perhaps twenty thousand lira in the inflated currency of the day, and sent it out to them by the waiter. They received it dumbly. They could not believe their eyes. They stared at it. They turned it over. They gazed at each other and at us. Then, suddenly realizing the full splendour of their windfall, as one boy they turned and leapt hilariously away down the street, dancing, skipping, flying almost, two little untidy blobs of legs, flapping clothes and tangled hair, laughing away out of sight towards the harbour.
And I relish still, as you may relish some intimate retreat of Chelsea or Greenwich Village, the duck-hunter’s house at Grado into which the officers of the 9th had gained some privilege of access. It was the warmest, snuggest place imaginable. We would sit by the fire in the kitchen while the lady of the house prepared our meal, drinking grappa or red wine and practising our Italian upon the duck man, and all round us the game-birds hung upside-down from their hooks, giving the room a still-life look, and making one feel deliciously insulated against the dank marsh outside. There were only oil-lamps in the house, and when our soup was ready we would take the light with us to the table in the sitting-room, and squeeze ourselves in at the white-clothed table against the wall. Our host would sit backwards on a chair beside us, to see us properly settled, and later sometimes his wife came in too, wiping her hands on her apron, to wish us buon appetito: but presently they left us with our roast duck, our wine and ourselves, so that we sat there drinking, talking and eating until the night was half gone, the lamp began to gutter and smell, and we must reluctantly tumble out of that best of clubs, that Pratts of the Veneto, into our truck and back to camp.
Extract from Conundrum
Jan Morris © 2001
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