Arts

Soldier - A Treatment

This is the story of two men Ian Thomas and John Wikinson. They are now in their late forties, John being 50 and Ian being 49. In childhood they grew up together, sharing the same group of friends and the same enemies. In class they sat one behind the other, that was how they met with Ian flicking ink all over John’s back by accident whilst trying to replenish his nib from the inkwell during a French lesson.

From that moment on they were friends and nothing was going to get in the way of that friendship. John being the slightly older one was in fact the emotionally weaker one though Ian never thought that. They bunked off school a lot, especially in 1955 when the tenth anniversary of the end of WWII was being celebrated. Hanging around bombsites and playing down by the docks amongst the remains of the war effort.

At the end of that school year they went too far and missed the last morning of school when the head mistress was giving her Foundation Day address, or rather one of the Old Boys was giving it, she was just sitting primly on the stage watching him do so with admiration since this particular old boy had been a sweet heart of hers until he’d gone off to North Africa to fight Rommel and come back with only one leg and a heavy dose of clap. When they finally get to school that afternoon the Head mistress gives them a real telling off and says that she is going to write to their parents about this.

Ian reacts by running away, he runs away down onto the Underground, a place the two boys use as their hideout. Down there he decides that he will remain there until he is old enough to join the army and then he will emerge and sign up. This is what he tells John when he comes looking for him. Ian’s love for the army has been instilled in him from his uncle, a man who never went to war himself since he had an inner ear problem that affected his balance and was partially deaf.

This didn’t stop him from making up stories to tell Ian about being in the trenches and going over the top ( something that they did in WWI not WWII but then the uncle had heard this from his own uncle as a child and persisted in thinking that that was the way that wars were still fought). John, being the weaker of the two, has no interest in fighting, he wants to gets out into the world, he too is waiting to grow up and leave home but for him he wants to be an accountant. This is what he has chosen after seeing his father working long hours in the factory and to John it is obvious that shifting large numbers from one column to the next is far more easier than shifting large crates of tool parts from one building to the next. When Ian finally emerges from the Underground he is given a good hiding from his dad and for the whole of the summer he thinks about nothing but getting out, growing older and leaving.

Throughput the summer the two boys use the underground as their base, having fights with other boys and talking about what they want to do. In this way we find out more about what makes them tick, what turns them on, what disgusts them.

As the years pass the tunnel that they used to hide away in becomes a second home to them. It is the place where Ian brings his first girlfriend for a heavy petting session and also where he brings his next girlfriend for his first sexual encounter. John starts to drift away from the tunnel as he gets older, partly because Ian seem to have made it his own but also because he has lost his father (the two are 16 and 17 at the time). Finally Ian invites John down there for the last time.

They are very different now, John has been working as a clerk at a local frim for four months and though he has been putting most of his money into the housekeeping to look after his mother he has airs and graces. He wears a new suit, made from pure wool. The revolution of the sixties is just getting under way but it is clear that John will probably miss most of it. All he can talk about is the money he is making and about how Mr. Fosdyke, his boss, is thinking of paying for his accountancy part I exams. He also sneers at the tunnel, it is a childish thing and should be consigned to the past as far as he is concerned. Ian however is bubbling with enthusiasm, he has asked John down there for one last time because he has just got his papers to join up in the army and he will be gone for maybe three years maybe longer.

The army seems to be a great choice for Ian at that time, Suez has passed, the Yanks are involved in Vietnam but not the Brits, Northern Ireland wont be an issue for another nine years and the Falklands are just a dot on a map. There is a Golden age dawning in the Britain, the Buy British campaign is under full swing, the Beatles have just released their first album and taken the country by storm and Dr. No has just come out to glamourise the work of the British Government. OK there have been riots in Notting Hill over the large numbers of Carribean immigrants, Enoch Powell’s been on the rampage and they’re burning Black churches in the deep south of America, sometimes with the congregation still inside. But then you never hear about this sort of stuff in programmes like Heartbeat (excuse the blasphemy) and that is for a good reason, we see these things when we look back through the telescope of hindsight, everything becomes compressed, at the time though…

Ian is overjoyed. He has a radio playing hit tunes, he’d installed that years earlier, and he has bottles of beer. Sneakily bought from an off licence in South London. He wants to celebrate and John, his oldest friend John, is the person he wants to celebrate with. They drink a toast to the future, John tries some of the strange tobacco that Ian’s been going on about for ages and they have a mellow evening deep in the bowels of the earth. They don’t see each other again for fifteen years.

Close up on the calendar, the pages rip off and flow towards the screen as the years pass. The clock whizzes round, threatening to take off as the hour hand becomes a blur, overhead the sun rises and sets in the blink of an eye. Kennedy is shot, John Glenn walks in space, Martin Luther King is shot, Neil Armstrong says his immortal words, Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday, Yom Kippur, The Beatles split up, there is an oil crisis, then the Queens Silver Jubilee.

Ian comes out of the army in 1977.

Whilst in there he has changed in some ways, he doesn’t worry about death. He was involved in the Tet Offensive (though no one is supposed to know about that), he was one of the first troops sent into Northern Ireland by a powerless British Government trying in vain to prevent what subsequently happened. In Israel he was seconded to the Mossad’s own crack commando troops to help in logistical planning. And yet a look at his career record doesn’t show any of this. He seems to have served three five year terms with no great impact and finally he is discharged. He has a military cross and a half pension from the government to show for the blood he has spilled for the flag and the queen.

He is a changed man in many respects, he has had fellow soldiers bleed all over him in a ditch in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland he narrowly escaped being kneecapped by an IRA judicial squad because he popped out to go to the loo, his comrades didn’t though, in the desert he had had to throw himself from a burning tank, his flesh seared up his right arm, in this state he hurriedly hid himself in the sand whilst Lebanese soldiers shot the other tank crew members first in their genitals as a symbol that the Jews shouldn’t procreate then in the back of the head at point blank range. He wasn’t found otherwise he would have shared the same fate. He eventually got himself back to his base camp and spent three months recuperating.

Ian has seen death many times and to him it holds no greater fears than those he has seen before.

During this time John has also been busy, he has risen, more through natural wastage than any talent, to the position of partner in the firm of Fosdyke Wilkinson and Blane. At the top of the only tree he will ever climb John has settled now into the quiet sedentary life. He has a wife and two children, one boy and one girl. He hopes that he doesn’t treat them the way his father did him and then feels guilty at that thought. His mother passed away less than five years after his father and he and his family now live in the house he inherited.

One night he hears a knock on the door, his wife answers and he hears her talking to someone in the hall way. Then the living room door opens and in walks Ian. After fifteen years they have both done so much but they both have so little that they can sa to each other but they still have that friendship that tied them together all those years ago. Ian stays at John’s place for three months, his wife likes him, the children take to him and gradually they renew their friendship. Ian finally gets a job as a security consultant with a publishing company but then discovers his own ability to work with words.

Up to now he has only ever worked with men, moulding them to do what is required, using his own skills and qualities to get them to do the seemingly impossible. Now he sees that he can do the same with words. Within a year he is working as a copywriter in an ad company coming up with corporate straplines like ‘Partners in Time’ for a city bank, ‘Cruising for Compliments’ for a car company (These are rather crap, not a patch on ‘Watch out there’s a Humphrey about’ or ‘Let the train take the strain’ but something like these will come to me later).

Very soon Ian has set up his own Ad company and is being feted by customers the world over, he is the Norman Foster of Corporate Advertising at a time when the very concept of Corporate Advertising is still in it’s infancy. Thus he is in at the start and so very successful. His company is offered the initial utilities privatisations but he vetoes this as he doesn’t believe in the fragmentation of ‘His England’. This does not affect his company’s fortunes though, they go from strength to strength. He finds he has more time to live a little and so goes for the dangerous sport, bungee jumping from balloons, the Cresta run, the top ten peaks in the Himalayas, and of course the Mig 19 flight.

He meets Marriane at a big bash his company has organised for the launch of a new car and they hit it off immediately and within six months she has moved in with him. He refuses to marry her but assures her that as long as they are together he will make sure that she is well looked after in the event of his demise.

John has now become the chief partner of the firm and the firm is doing well mainly because it is getting all the business from Ian’s company.

Unfortunately John has started to cream off a little from the accounts and hiding the losses through creative methods, private school fees, his wife’s clothing bills, a few unfortunate investments have left him no other options.

Ian buys a set of lead soldiers at auction. They have a mysterious history, seemingly being cursed, the last owner of them disappeared and was never seen again and the pieces were donated to a small museum which is forced to sell them. Ian snaps them up, unheeding of the supposed curse on them.

As he looks at them, with John present ( complaining that he shouldn’t be frittering money on such trifles) he accidentally stabs himself with the bayonet of one of the soldiers. Over the next few days Ian becomes morose, he argues with Marriane and disappears off for long periods without telling the office where he is. He has been putting the company records onto a computer and has found some anomalies which he can’t explain but hopes John will be able to. But before he can tackle that he finds that his finger has developed a greenish hue where he pricked himself.

He thinks nothing of this until the next day he wakes to find that it has spread to other fingers and that his hand is now stiffening up. The curse is manifesting itself. He tries to find out about the previous owner but can find very little. Eventually he goes to the museum and there gets a chance to see some of the diaries of the benefactor. We don’t know if he finds anything about the curse or not but that night he is in his office writing his will and getting it witnessed and confirmed. He makes a call to Marriane that he might not be back that night and then turns out the lights in the office and leaves.

John looks for him, he has heard that Ian is acting a little strangely and fears that he may have found out about the money that is missing. John had always intended to return the money but had not been able to and still can’t. But he has a plan that would exonerate him of all guilt, unfortunately it will drop his old friend Ian right in it but it is only way.

All he needs is Ian’s signature on a vital document and then he can rest easy. He searches for him all through London but can’t find him. Eventually he goes to that one place they both shared, the one place they both felt was safe. The Underground.

Here he finally comes upon a disheveled figure huddled up in a blanket surrounded by vomit in a decaying tunnel damp with moisture and smelling of rust and rotten vegetables. He is surrounded by a time capsule of items, a rotten radio, old posters and pamphlets, cans and bottles and candle stumps, as well as the carved inscription ‘IT and JW 1956′ and below that ‘AND 1962′.

They talk about the things that I have mentioned. John needs the signature but Ian has already worked out that John has been stealing money and that the signiature is just to save John’s neck. Additionally we now find out that the curse is one which falls only on the owner of the soldiers and it will turn them into lead soldiers themselves (Ian demonstrates this by showing his body under the blanket, only his head and neck are still made of flesh the rest is pliable grey metal shaped like a soldiers uniform with hints of colour.

Ian then tells John that he has passed the curse on to him by having the soldier set left to John in Ian’s will. As Ian finally expires John hears the scraping of what could be a mouse but could also be a small lead soldier making it’s way towrds him through the tunnels, a shadow looms round the corner, a scream and then dark silence….

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