“Eleven out of thirteen on the target,” the instructor declared. “Very nice, very nice indeed. Next time, stick to two shots at a time please, and wait till I give the fire order.” To Avery, the subaltern, he said, “Care to have a go, sir?”
Leiser had walked up to the target and was lightly tracing the bullet holes with his slim hands. The silence was suddenly oppressive. He seemed lost in meditation, feeling the plywood here and there, running a finger thoughtfully along the outline of the German helmet, until the instructor called, “Come on, we haven’t got all day.”
Avery stood on the gym mat, measuring the weight of the gun. With the instructor’s help he inserted one magazine, clutching the other nervously in his left hand. Haldane and Leiser looked on.
Avery fired, the heavy gun thudding in his ears, and he felt his young heart stir as the silhouette flickered passively to his shooting.
“Good shot, John, good shot!”
“Very good,” said the instructor automatically. “A very good first effort, sir.” He turned to Leiser: “Do you mind not shouting like that?” He knew a foreigner when he saw one.
“How many?” Avery asked eagerly, as he and the sergeant gathered round the target, touching the blackened perforations scattered thinly over the chest and belly. “How many, Staff?”
“You’d better come with me, John,” Leiser whispered, throwing his arm over Avery’s shoulder. “I could do with you over there.” For a moment Avery recoiled. Then, with a laugh, he put his own arm around Leiser, feeling the warm, crisp cloth of his sports jacket in the palm of his hand.
The instructor led them across the parade ground to a brick barrack like a theatre with no windows, tall at one end. There were walls half crossing one another like the entrance to a public lavatory.
“Moving targets,” Haldane said. “And shooting in the dark.”
At lunch they played the tapes.
The tapes were to run like a theme through the first two weeks of his training. They were made from old phonograph records; there was a crack in one which recurred like a metronome. Together, they comprised a massive parlor game in which things to be remembered were not listed but mentioned, casually, obliquely, often against a distracting background of other noises, now contradicted in conversation, now corrected or contested. There were three principal voices, one female and two male. Others would interfere. It was the woman who got on their nerves.
She had that antiseptic voice which air hostesses seem to acquire. In the first tape she read from lists, quickly. First it was a shopping list, two pounds of this, one kilo of that; without warning she was talking about colored skittles—so many green, so many ochre; then it was weapons, guns, torpedoes, ammunition of this and that caliber; then a factory with capacity, waste and production figures, annual targets and monthly achievements. In the second tape she had not abandoned these topics, but strange voices distracted her and led the dialogue into unexpected paths.
While shopping she entered into an argument with the grocer’s wife about certain merchandise which did not meet with her approval; eggs that were not sound, the outrageous cost of butter. When the grocer himself attempted to mediate he was accused of favoritism; there was talk of points and ration cards, the extra allowance of sugar for jam-making; a hint of undisclosed treasures under the counter. The grocer’s voice was raised in anger but he stopped when the child intervened, talking about skittles. “Mummy, Mummy, I’ve knocked over the three green ones, but when I tried to put them up, seven black ones fell down; Mummy, why are there only eight black ones left?”
The scene shifted to a public house. It was the woman again. She was reciting armaments statistics; other voices joined in. Figures were disputed, new targets stated, old ones recalled; the performance of a weapon—a weapon unnamed, undescribed— was cynically questioned and heatedly defended.
Every few minutes a voice shouted “Break!” It might have been a referee—and Haldane stopped the tape and made Leiser talk about football or the weather, or read aloud from a newspaper for five minutes by his watch (the clock on the mantelpiece was broken). The tape recorder was switched on again, and they heard a voice, vaguely familiar, trailing a little like a parson’s; a young voice, deprecating and unsure, like Avery’s: “Now here are the four questions. Discounting those eggs which were not sound, how many has she bought in the last three weeks? How many skittles are there altogether? What was the annual overall output of proved and calibrated gun barrels for the years 1937 and 1938? Finally, put in telegraph form any information from which the length of the barrels might be computed.”