"In the Raj", with its conversational but well-disciplined unrhymed quatrains, feels strangely like a downbeat development of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills and his poems of the colonial life. (Although only "Never no more . . . never no more" hints at a Kipling-style refrain.) The "pleasure" mentioned in the poem's last line is hardly evident in these anecdotal recollections, with their feverish atmosphere, subordinates betrayed by their superiors and the recurrent threat of military prison.

The work of C. H. Sisson (1914–2003), poet, translator and civil servant, began appearing in the TLS in the 1970s. Like Kipling, he could speak with authority about the joys of life under the "sun of Asia" – or joy's absence – having served with the British Army in India during the Second World War. As well as "In the Raj", his books On the Look-Out: A partial autobiography (1989) and An Asiatic Romance (1953), a satire, draw on those years.

In the Raj

He was a tight-lipped devil and a rigorous
Company sergeant-major, I recall
Under the sweaty sky of Barrackpore,
Where all was sweat, where clothes were never dry

And Bengal rot started between our toes.
The sun of Asia! So it seemed to us
And the dead rotting by the Ganges shore
Where melons grow huge but taste of nothing

And the poor lie all day upon the streets
While the exquisite Brahmin minces by.
The air-conditioned and American
Left us to treason and the Queen's red-coats.

Quiet and moderate men, you might say,
Shipped out there, packaged, waiting for our turn
And doing nothing with expiring hope
But drive the kites off from our stinking food.

C. S. M. Birt was adept at all this,
Long enough resident to have prepared
His own devices for a happy life
Or, if not happy, one he could control.

It came first like a rumour in the dark,
Then in the sun, that something was amiss:
The C. S. M. glowered and said less
And what the sepoys said I do not know.

I was elsewhere, a thousand miles away,
When an explicit story reached my ears.
C. S. M. Birt had been under arrest,
Then court-martialled. What the swine had done

Was to sell army pistols in the bazaar.
So far, there was only curiosity.
But then the tale came out. One night the guard
Of Indian Other Ranks had turned out

While Birt said he would check the weapon store.
He took the pistols and accused the guard
- Such turpitude behind those foxy eyes
Which seemed dishonest, abject is what they were.

It was some two years later I saw Birt
And at a depot far from Barrackpore.
With three stripes on my arm I stood outside
The sergeants' mess and Birt came slinking past,

Abashed, silent, shorn of his insolence,
Looking at no one and his face was dead,
The first day out of gaol, a cowed man
Waiting a posting where he was not known.

Different was Curly, now inside the mess:
A rough, soft-spoken man, I do not know
What his crime had been when, years before,
He had done time in a military prison,

Running in circles in the blazing sun.
The N. C. O. in charge threw boxing-gloves
And any man they hit must fight with him,
A bruiser with a pair of bruising gloves.

'Never no more,' Curly would say, 'never no more,
They won't get me again, happen what may.'
He drew a long breath and turned aside
Into the racket of the gramophone.

It was a servile life, the only dream
Was white wings over the fucking cliffs of Dover.
Roll on that fucking boat. Get up them stairs.
And some of the fucking officers was shits.

But one especially, as I remember,
A jumped-up quarter-master, regular,
Who wired a hut to spy upon the men.
It was a round-faced corporal who refused

To obey orders while the wires were there
And in a flash was put behind bars
While sympathetic mates did guard outside.
I do not know the end of that story

Except that two days later he was out,
The wires dismantled and adjutant
Putting the best face on it that he could.
And I remember other men, six or seven

Years out from home, promised a break at last
Then told they could not go, whose passion would
Have torn the camp up and yet nothing happened,
So impotent was rage against the rule.

Ah servitude! We who have been in chains,
Accepting bitterness for every day,
Now walk as free as any men can be
And know that every pleasure ends in death.

C. H. SISSON (1983)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Architects" by Judith Wright, click here.

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