Tremor of Intent Read Online Free PDF Page B

was in the army, nobody ever once thought that here was a brain that could be utilised in the development of the most horrible offensive weapons. For that matter, my own ability to speak French and Russian quite well, and Polish moderately well, was seized on with no eagerness. I even had difficulty in transferring to the Intelligence Corps when it was formed in July, 1940. My officers spoke French with a public school accent; the British have always been suspiciousof linguistic ability, associating it with spies, impresarios, waiters, and Jewish refugees: the polyglot can never be a gentleman. It was not until the Soviet Union became one of our allies that I was allowed to bring my Russian into the open, and then there was long delay before it was used. It was used when there was some sort of programme of Anglo-American aid to Russia; I was brought in as a junior assistant interpreter. This sounds big enough stuff for one still so young, but it was only to do with the provision of sports equipment for the ratings of Soviet naval vessels. There was a bigger job that at one time I thought I might get, something to do with the putting of a bay leaf in every tin of American-aid chopped pork, the Russians finding pig-meat so un-garnished unpalatable, myself to explain that this would slow up deliveries, each bay leaf having to be dropped in separately by hand, but I never got the job. And now back to Roper.
    He wrote to me first of all from Aldershot, saying that a bomb had dropped near Boyce Barracks and he’d been thinking more than usual about death. Or rather what Catholics call the Four Last Things Ever To Be Remembered: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. He’d succeeded, he said, in blotting those doctrines out pretty well when he’d been in the Science Sixth, but what he wanted to know was this: did these things perhaps exist – the after-death things, that was – for somebody who believed in them? He’d been put in rather a false position, he thought, from the point of view of religion. When he’d arrived at the Depot as a recruit, they’d called out: ‘RCs this side, Protestants that, fancy buggers in the middle.’ His intention had been to declare himself an agnostic, but that would have put him right away among the United Board. So he said he was an RC – ‘on the surface, the army being all surface’. When he became a sergeant he found himself possessed not merely of authority but of Catholic authority. There was this business of helping to march the men to Mass on Sunday mornings. And the priest in the town church was decent, friendly, English not Irish,and he asked Roper to use his influence to make more of the men go to communion. But, after this bomb had dropped near Boyce Barracks, which was very early in his army career, he’d been made aware of the talismanic power of having ‘RC’ in his paybook. ‘You’re an RC,’ some of his barrack-room-mates had said. ‘Going to stick close to you we are next time one of those bastards drops.’ What Roper said in his letter was: ‘There seems to be a certain superstitious conviction among the men that the Catholics have more chance of “being all right” when death threatens. It’s as though there’s a hangover of guilt from the Reformation among the common people – “We didn’t want to get away from the Old Religion really, see. We was quite happy as we was. It was them upper-class bastards, Henry VIII and whatnot, that made us break away, see.”’
    And poor Roper, cut off from his science – though he learned the tricks of his corps so well that he was very quickly promoted – and living more with his emotional and instinctive needs, began to be aware of emptiness. ‘If only I could be re-converted or else converted to something else. What’s the point of fighting this war if we don’t believe that one way of life is better than