All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Its obligatory place on the school reading list meant that I first read Remarque’s devastating novel about the German experience in the Great War when I was fourteen. Over twenty years later it feels far more poignant; the young soldiers of nineteen seemed impossibly adult back then, they don’t now.

The story follows Paul Bäumer and three of his friends from school who join up at the behest of their schoolmaster. All now nineteen, they are trying to survive in the hell that is the Western Front, under constant bombardment and the threat of sniper fire, not to mention the periodic sorties across no-man’s-land in futile attempt to seize a few more square yards of land from the other side.

Relieved from active service at the front for a few days they are staying behind their lines in a French village. Swimming in the river one day, they attract the attention of three local women who indicate that they might want to bring some food around to their house that evening... A bit of Dutch courage is needed first, and to shake off one of their pals:

No one can cross the bridge without leave, so we will simply have to swim over tonight. We are full of excitement. We cannot last without a drink, so we go to the canteen where there is beer and a kind of punch. We drink punch and tell one another lying games of our experiences. Each man gladly believes the other man’s story, only waiting impatiently till he can cap it with a taller tale. Our hands are fidgety, we smoke countless cigarettes, until Kropp says: “We might as well take them a few cigarettes too.” So we put some inside our caps to keep them. The sky turns apple green. There are four of us, but only three can go; we must shake off Tjaden, so ply him with rum and punch until he rocks.  As it turns dark we go to our billets. Tjaden in the centre. We are glowing and full of a lost for adventure. The little brunette is mine, we have settled all that. Tjaden drops on his sack of straw and snores. Once he wakes up and grins so craftily that we are alarmed and begin to think that he is cheating, and that we have given him the punch to no purpose. Then he drops back again and sleeps on.

The evening is a success, although Paul leaves depressed. Later, he is given two weeks leave and makes his way back home. He makes the mistake of falling in with some of his old school masters and accepting a smoke. After the reality of the front, their enthusiasm for the war is shocking:

Unfortunately, I have accepted the cigar, so I have to remain. And they are all so dripping with good will that it is impossible to object. All the same, I feel annoyed and smoke like a chimney as hard as I can. In order to make at least some show of appreciation I toss off the beer in one gulp. Immediately a second is ordered; people know how much they are indebted to the soldiers. They argue about what we ought to annex. The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia. He produces reasons why we must have them and is quite inflexible until at last the others give in to him. Then he beings to expound just whereabouts in France the break-through must come, and turns to me: “Now, shove ahead a bit there with your everlasting trench warfare – Smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace.” In reply that in our opinion a break-through may not be possible. The enemy may have too many reserves. Besides, the war may be rather different from what people think. He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “But this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only your little sector and so you cannot have any general survey. You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour – every man on you ought to have the Iron Cross – but first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top.” He blows his nose and wipes his beard. “Completely rolled up they must be, from the top to the bottom. And then to Paris.” I would like to know how he pictures it to himself, and pour the third glass of beer into me. Immediately he orders another.

Paul makes his excuses and leaves. Even though he has survived the war so far, inside he was killed long ago.

Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières

This is an absolute treat. I came by it after reading a review in the Graun that made reference to the Surrey Tyrol where the book is set, which was enough to send me off to the library for a copy. It’s set in that hilly part of the county between Godalming and Haslemere; not close enough to where I grew up to be my stamping ground proper, but near enough for me to recognise the terrain. That said, this book’s appeal is universal. Louis de Bernières has put the whole human comedy onto the pages in a series of interwoven short stories about the inhabitants of the village Notwithstanding.

In Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers, the titular Mrs Griffiths is a misanthropic widow who has a disdainful outlook on most things in life, especially young people and the gnarled old countryman Obadiah ‘Jack’ Oak, who hangs around Notwithstanding in a fug of six decades of neglected hygiene.

It’s coming up to Christmas and Mrs Griffiths is preparing to send her cards to the respectable folk in the village. However, a sense of emptiness has come into her life since her husband died, so she’s also decided that this year she will make mince pies and punch for the village carol singers, instead of turning off the lights and pretending she’s not in as she usually does:

Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum.

The carol singers eventually appear, but at her garden gate she hears them discussing whether to bother singing at her door. Coming to the conclusion that she’s an old skinflint who will only hide when they start singing, they miss her out. Angry and frustrated to the point that she cries for the first time since she was a child, Mrs Griffiths starts on her Christmas cards instead. The job requires fortification:

She gets up from her chair and, without really thinking about it, eats a mince pie and takes a glass of punch. She had forgotten how good they can be, and she feels the punch igniting her insides. The sensuality of it shocks and seduces her, and she takes another glass... A rebellious whim creeps up on her. She glances around as if to check that she is truly alone in the house, and then she stands up and shouts, “Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody.” She adds, “Bloody children, bloody bloody.” She attempts “bollocks” but merely embarrasses herself and tries “bugger” instead. She drinks more punch and says, “Bloody bugger.”

Sloshed on punch, Mrs Griffiths is spurred into uncharacteristic charity. She writes cards to everyone in the village, even to the people who own the pub and vote Labour. She boxes up the remaining mince pies and puts them on the doorstep of Obadiah Oak’s house. After that she comes home and completes what she’s started:

When she returns she finishes off the punch, and then heaves herself upstairs with the aid of the banisters. She is beginning to feel distinctly ill, and heads for her bed with the unconscious but unswerving instinct of a homing pigeon. She reminds herself to draw the curtains so that no one will be able to pry and spy, and then she undresses with difficulty, and throws her clothes on the floor with all the perverse but justified devilment of one who has been brought up not to, and has never tried it before. She extinguishes the light and crawls into bed, but every time that she closes her eyes she begins to feel seasick.

As well she might...

Wilt by Tom Sharpe

I hadn't read Tom Sharpe since I was at school so there was some reassurance in finding that Wilt, his satire on education, women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was just as I remembered him. It's a bit dated now, but once it gets into its stride parts of it are still hilariously funny. There are a lot of references to rather outré sexual practices, as in all of his books, and plenty to booze, which gets it an entry here.

Downtrodden at his dreadful lecturing job (he is employed by a technical college to teach The Lord of the Flies to apprentice butchers, plasterers and gas fitters) and henpecked by his wife Eva, Henry Wilt dreams of asserting himself, if only he knew how. While he fantasises about killing Eva he has no idea how by going to a ghastly barbecue party things conspire to make it look like he’s actually got his way.

The Pringsheims, a visiting chemistry professor from America and his bonkers wife, have invited Wilt and Eva round to their little soiree. Unfortunately, neither realise that Sally Pringsheim has designs on Eva, and is prepared to stoop to any level to get her away from her husband. Wilt doesn’t help himself by drinking a little too much punch at the party:

In the end he looked into a large bucket with a ladle in it. Half an orange and segments of bruised peach floated in a purple liquid. He poured himself a paper cup and tried it. As he had anticipated, it tasted like cider with wood alcohol and orange squash.

Despite initial misgivings, he has a bit more:

Wilt stood in the middle of the garden and finished his third drink. He poured himself a fourth...

Drunk and suddenly cornered by Sally Pringsheim, he finds himself taken upstairs where Sally produces a bottle of vodka:

‘Oh, Henry, you’re so perceptive,” said Sally, and unscrewed the top of the vodka bottle... She swigged from the bottle and gave it to Wilt. He took a mouthful inadvisedly and had trouble swallowing it.

What follows is a disastrous set of events involving public humiliation with an inflatable sex doll, a thirty foot deep hole and twenty tons of concrete...

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

Starting, in my mind, with one of the best opening lines in contemporary literature - It was the day my Grandmother exploded - Iain Banks’ The Crow Road is the story of the McHoan family, mainly viewed through the eyes of youngest scion Prentice.


Tragedy and untimely death seem to stalk the McHoan clan; the exploding grandmother falls off a ladder in the beginning of the book, and the central story concerns the mystery of Prentice’s Uncle Rory, missing for many years.

There are glorious descriptions of alcohol throughout, and being a Scottish writer, Banks includes copious references to whisky. Flicking through the book I was spoilt for choice: In the end, I decided to pick a scene I recall very clearly from when I first read it back in 1996. Prentice has gone to a family party the day after Hogmanay, only to discover the his elder brother Lewis is now going out with Verity, the woman Prentice has lusted after from afar for years. Distinctly put out, he gets stuck into the booze:

I went through to the dining-room and helped myself to a pint of the neuron-friendly punch that Uncle Hamish always made for the event... We sipped - or in my case gulped - the weak but tasty punch, nibbled on Aunt Tone’s buffet-bits, and played Alternative Charades; an invention of my father’s in which one first has to guess the category of the thing one is being asked to decipher.

No easy task for a man who has rather rapidly got through a skinful of punch.

My last memory is of trying to mime Rare Gynaecological Disorders, preparatory to attempting Toxic Shock Syndrome. But apparently people insisted that one stand up to do one’s piece, and I - successfully acclimatised to the horizontal by this time - refused to pander to this sort of nit picking, and so passed my turn on to my Cousin Josh with as much good grace as I could muster.

Outrage is only moments away. Prentice, oblivious to the world by now, only finds out exactly what he said to his brother and his girlfriend, in front of everyone in the room, when his mother speaks to him the next day. She lets him have it chapter and verse:

I felt the blood draining from my neck like somebody had opened a valve in my ankle... “And I think we all successfully worked out what ‘doing the Delta Foxtrot’ was, as well, before you became totally incoherent.”

Prentice spends the rest of the day apologising and trying to recover with Irn Bru and spring water...