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Rogers’s room had a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two beds and two hard-backed chairs. The room would normally have held two page 24 boarders, but as an acknowledgement of his status in the Palmer household, he had been given the room to himself. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, waiting for the dinner gong. It was an army habit to lie down when you had nothing to do. He wondered how he would manage in the coming year. He certainly hadn’t expected to be given a class of infants, but he didn’t object. Even so, it reflected badly on Heath’s organizing ability that the infant department should be in the hands of two rather in experienced teachers, himself and Miss Johnson, who was relieving till a new infant mistress was appointed. Perhaps things would be better when she came. When he had demurred at not having expected a class of infants, Heath had firmly told him that the older members of the staff were entitled to first consideration. But was that the point? The welfare of the school should have been the first consideration. Didn’t it seem that Heath was afraid of treading on someone’s toes, and to justify himself was playing off one section of his staff against another? Even so, Rogers looked forward to teaching again, and infant experience would be good for the time when he would be in sole charge of a country school.

On his chest of drawers was a Country Library Service book—A. S. Neill: The Problem Child. That and a book on education by Ethel Mannin had been his most exciting reading lately, old though they were. He was jealous of the opportunities Neill had had to deal with delinquent children. To strike any in Coal Flat would be too much to hope for. The children here would be average—rowdy, ready to learn but slower than you would wish, disobedient but never in revolt. It was characteristic of Rogers that he felt uncomfortable with everything that was average and normal.

Was that at the bottom of his objection to military service? That now seemed a long time past, and the ideals he had professed were embarrassing to think of like a past he had to live down. Sometimes he could afford to be avuncular towards them, smiling at the dreams of youth. They were rather like a varsity blazer, recalling silly undergraduate antics and yet a period of hope, ambition and self-fulfilment. But there were times when he winced to recall them and wished he could obliterate them from his life.

For he had stubbornly worn the varsity blazer. From the start he had expected the wind to blow through it, the moths to get at it—the Truth attacks on conscientious objectors, the unwilling headiness when the bands led the first recruiting parades, the white-feather glances from people who thought he was shirking, the shaded whispers behind his back, and then his own despairs. He had thought all he needed was courage, to wear the blazer in a page 25 crowd of uniforms. When he despaired of the world ever being converted to pacifism pure and simple, his whole effort seemed pointless and arrogant: it was as if he was saying that the whole world was out of step, except for pacifists. In self-pitying mood he had even thought of suicide: go down with the blazer rather than take it off. But that was as far as it got. In the end the army gave him non-combatant service, but he knew the victory was theirs. Because the blazer was too big for him: he gave up trying to get his hands clear of the cuffs. Struggling inside the unfitting folds was the little boy who had grown up next door to Belle Hansen.

It was young Paul Rogers from the house next door to Belle’s that put on the hated uniform and got on the train. He felt he had sold out—yet formally he had won, because he hadn’t objected to non-combatant service. He was humbled like a penitent child by the deep unrecognized knowledge that he no longer believed in his objections; that it had only been stubbornness that kept him fighting till he had won his point. Once he was in the army he hid his flags and covered his tracks. An officer said, ‘Twenty? You were a long time coming in,’ and he lied: ‘I was exempted.’ The little boy wanted a chance to get his bearings.

For, once that first fight was over, he saw everything in a different perspective: that it wasn’t simply an old-style war where workers of one country were pitched against workers of another, where the conflict could be ended by a refusal to fight by both sides. That fascism was a worse threat to men than war itself. That in Europe and Asia people were suffering, dying, fighting, sacrificing themselves and being tortured for their race, their beliefs, for a cause, while he had been sitting back consulting his conscience. It was humiliating to admit to oneself that one had been so completely wrong. He had applied for a transfer from the Medical Corps to the infantry, but by then he was a trained medical orderly, and the army wouldn’t shift him, and why should the army reorganize itself every time he had a change of conscience?

Yet what else should he have done? If he had simply shrugged away his principles in the first place, gone to camp along with everyone else, he couldn’t have held up his head to himself again. At that stage it was necessary to bear witness to his principles, even if they were wrong ones. The thing would have been to have made sure they were right in the first place. But once he had decided on his course he refused to re-examine the situation, because he was afraid of finding excuses for a retreat: romantic stubbornness, not reason, kept him in his first position. And the society he lived in kept him there too.

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To most of the people he knew this was just another of those wars in which the Mother Country got involved periodically, through the knavery of foreigners, another jingoistic war like the Boer War and the First World War. It was this kind of war he was protesting against. Only he was as deceived as anyone else; like other people he thought it was a war against Germans, not against Nazis. The beginning of his doubt in his position came when Russia entered the war, for at that time he admired the one country of socialism. But he stubbornly fought his doubts, because he was afraid that he might have to accuse himself of having ratted on his principles.

When he came out of the army he got a Rehabilitation grant to finish his B.A. The clerk at the Rehab. office advised him to do this and actually filled in the application form for him, handing it over only for his signature. Rogers was uneasy at taking these benefits so readily. Yet he wanted to bury the past; to raise any objections to accepting this aid would be like renewing his objections to service in the first place. It would only have irritated the clerk, and would probably have seemed irrelevant to him. He would have pointed out that according to the regulations returned soldiers with so many years overseas service were entitled to so many years at university if they needed it. It wouldn’t have affected him that Rogers couldn’t even have claimed active service; two years in the Pacific, the last year of the war in Egypt and Italy, his only contact with the enemy was with Italian prisoners of war who served in the mess at Ma’adi. ‘You had no choice where you were sent,’ the clerk would have said. ‘You might have been sent to some nasty spots, but you weren’t.’

So that now he felt guilty. Society had called on him to fight, and he had refused. Then after he had changed his mind and served in the army, society had helped him to study. Society was paying him back for service he had actually done; that was true. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that he had got more than he deserved. And he wanted to make up for it by co-operating harder with society, by living down his past, asking fewer questions, rebelling less, conforming more. A faint voice inside him said, ‘You’ve been bought,’ but he made it shut up.