NT N8
TRUANT
MAURICE ROWDON,
Full length film story.
The story begins with the evacuation of school children
from London in the summer of 1939. The war has not yet broken
out. For JOHN, who is already eighteen, itis a welcome change
of air: he looks longingly at the Hampshire hills and woods when
the train arrives. This is just like a holiday, but a strange
and ecstatic one---a holiday from which he will never go back,
a trip indt a life about which he can predict absolutely nothing,
as vague as the marvellous warm haze that hangs over the fields
as they assemble in groups for their billets. He will be called
up soon, if there's a war. But he feels there won't be. Every-
body feels the same. Yet there is something wild in Hitler's
speeches, and something ineffectual in Chamberlain's, that tell
him that war will come. Yet the sense of a holiday remains.
It is in the air. But he remembers his parents. His last
glimpse of the London backstreet where he lives was a troubling
one.
The village has a pond and elm trees: the roads are virtually
empty of traffic---business has slowed up, which adds to the sense
of holiday and peace. He is given a billet with three or four
other boys: the woman who owns the house is a drunkard, which
suits him and the other boys wonderfully; they take her cigarettes,
which she doesn't notice, and help her down her sherry, which
amuses her. She slurs her words, sitting at the kitchen table,
talking about the husband who was brutal to her, and seeming to
enjoy the idea of brutality. He discovers the war means freedom,
but perhaps a freedom too broad---it brings feathers to his belly.
He goes for walks. The leisured weeks pass. War is declared
but nothing changes. His mo ther weites that the air raid siren
sounded just as war was being declared, but nothing happened.
He returns to London for a 'holiday', this time back into
his past.
Croydon aerodrome is bombed while he is there. He
is walking home from the library when the siren goes. The streets
are utterly deserteds not a soul their whole length. He has
never seen the streets like this before.
He passes a solitary
man leaning against his gate in the silence, and he says to him
in a half-hysterical merriment, 1 Another false alarm.' But the
man simply stares before him, with a set face, not even glancing
in JOHN'S direction. Ald in that man's face JOHN reads the
whole of the next four years.
When he returns to the country a girl's school has moved
near by, of a higher class than his own. Some of the senior


boys of his 'poor' school are invited by one or two liberal-
minded teachers of the girl's school to tea, He is one of them,
He meets the geography teacher and his wife: he likes their easy
behaviour; their house is cluttered up with babies and dirty
washing up and books. For them inviting his class was a kind
of social experiment: he is their reward; they find him bright
and imaginative, One evenings, in the dusk, when they are all
sitting round in the teacher's house, with the windows open, at
the foot of a steep green hill, not a sound coming from outside,
KATHY comes in and says a brief and awkward ' Hullo', and sits
herself down without a word, She is one of the girls from the
teacher's school. JOHN watches her in the darkness-- --black hair
that makes her face seem to shine, and gleaming teeth and eyes:
they are both quite still, while the others talk: they say nothing,
and she leaves. Softly the geography man's wife asks him,
I Did you like Cathy?' and he says briefly, thinking that he is
revealing nothing, 'Yes.'
JOHN and CATHY meet again. They go for a walk, He falls
in love. Théy sit on a path in the woods at dawn, after being
at the teacher's house all night, talking: she throws twigs at
him playfully; they kiss. They creep into the kitchen of his
billet just as the sun is coming up: they are cold and hungry,
he wraps his thick jacket round her. The copper pans gleam on
the wall in the first sun,
One morning he is lying in bed at the teacher': S house and
suddenly writes on a piece of paper, 'I am happy. II want to write
this now SO that I always know, whatever happens to me in the
future. I am happy, now.' He tells KATHY on one of their walks
that it feels like playing truant, from reality. The war has
all but disappeared. Yet something must happen, This makes
their love all the more ecstatic. They have long hours at night
in each other's arms, with the window open at their side. He
listens to the news on the radio that Russia has allied herself
with nazi Germany, and sees what must happen for the first time:
doom seems to hang over the mahogany wireless set, in the empy
sitting room of his billet. England will be invaded: he is
trained, desultorily, Slittle, to put sugar in German petrol
tanks, cut trees across the road, destroy the little rustic
bridge: S. Yet he can't believe the idyll will end. It is
endless: no time is involved. KATHY gets into trouble at
school for staying out at night, always rushing off in the after-
noons. Their love has a kind of local fame.
KATHY is a tomboy, gay, quick, with bright cheeks that
swell like two apples when she smiles. She is from an intellect-
ual familys and a communist, like her mother. The time comes
for both sie and JOHN to leave school. They go to London,
For a time she lives at his parents' home with him, It is
her first experience of working-class life: she is entranced,


fascinated by the people her mother has always idolised, She
loves the little rituals of teatime, in the snug, tiny back-room
overlooking the garden. Her communist conscience has begun to
troublerunance she left school: she must find work in a factory,
she must do something useful. She knows that the pact with Russia
will not last long: her mother has been quite clear about that.
She must do something against nazism, and towards the revolution
that will certainly come to England when the war is over. She
and JOHN sit in the upstairs bedroom. One evening, quite unaware
of what he is saying, he murmurs to her, 'You know, this can't
last.' She says, catching a certain tone in his voice, 'What
do you mean?' He says in reply, I Are we going to marry?' She
says, 'I hadn't thought.' 'Yes,' she adds, 'I suppose.' He
is silent. 'What's the matter?' she asks him, He says, 'We
need our freedom, You might not want to stay with me always.
We might want some variety.' She asks, 'Don't you want me any
more?' 'Yes, yes. Always.' And they are silent again,
They go to pubs. An eleventh-heur bohemianism has entered
English life, a touch of squalor and self-indulgence, They meet
all sorts, painters, ballet damcers, theatre people. They tend
to live at night. KATHY leave SE for a trial week at a factory
near Aldershot: when the week is over she returns to the London
home but finds no one there; and she has no key; SQ she pulls
up the cover ofcoal-hole and gets in through the coal cellar,
When his parents come home there is a great gossip about it:
the neighbours are told: Thought we had burglars in!' He comes
home and hears it. Then his parents go out to a whs ist drive.
KATHY says, 'John, I've got something to say.' And he goes pale,
seeing her face., 'I slept with somebody,' she tells him, 'I
went back to theschool for a night, and Stan's brother was stay-
ing, on leave. It wasn't really sleeping with him, We were
naked. We kissed each other, that's all. All over. And said
darling. But not more.' He is wild, smacks her face. His
own face changes: it loses its simplicity, readiness for joy.
Her face becomes set too, as if she has forced some compassion out
of herself. She never forgets the smacks he gave her, nor does
he. They are no longer really youths. She reminds him about what
he had said, abott their needing variety.
They take a flit together, nearer the West End: flats are
gofng now, The rilads start, beginning with the raid on the Docks
one Saturday afternoont, in broad sunlight: they watch the tiny
gleaming planes in formation high in the sky, like slippery little
fish, out of reach to the flack of the aircraft guns. They don't
go into a shelter, JOHN and KATHY: the young never do. They sit
up at night talking, in drinking parties, with the riads going on
outside: the walls shake, there are near-misses, the guns pound
away. When there is a the hurtling whistle of a near-miss they
smile at each other, sitting on the floor, drinking, smoking.


He isn't happy: life is bCleak, He doesn't know what to do:
really he is waiting for his call-up papers, and it doesn't seem
worth while getting a job: she starts work in a London factory,
and he lives on what she earns. He becomes emptily gay and
useless: the sight of him with his long hair and extravagant shirts
makes her communist conscience wild, es specially after eight hours
at the factory. He is playing the fool one evening, putting on
a spotted cravat and dark glasses, and she screams, Take them
off! take them off' and smacks his face, flinging the glasses to
the floor. Afterwards, in the contrite silence, she says, 'I
enjoyed it, living with your mum and dad, But why aren't they
militant? Working people aren't militant ehough. They're
asleep! It was a disappointment really, though I'loved it.'
It is clear to him that she is also talking about him---the dis-
appointment she feels in him too, He says,'I'd rather be human
than miltant.'
She says,'Try it, in this war.' 'I'll always
try,' he tells her.
She stays away from him one whele night. This time she really
does sleep with somebody, without enjoying it. She tells him
afterwards, with wasted eyes, 'I did it to get rid of yeu. To get
you out of my body. I don't know why.' She flirts ostentatiously.
She falls in love with a student---really just an infatuation, which
she realises. She and JOHNsee little of each other. They meet
for the last time on a railway-platform, she has the student's long
college scarf round her neck, like an emblem: but she says, 'Don't
take this as final darling. You were right. We've got to have
our freedom,'
His call-up papers arrive-ta It is summer again. He takes
the train to his camp, the same/that took him to the Hampshire
village for evacuation. As a recruit he is shouted at, dropped
into ten-foot pits, madeto scale rope-heights, cross rivers
hanging in full-kit; he' is fired at with dummy bullets. But it
makes no impression on him, The report is that he seems half
doped, The officers look at him commiseratingly, from a dist-
ance, biting their lips. He catches clap---an adventure in a
disused railway tunnel. His officer snaps,'I don't like my
men going with women.' And he is got rid of as soon as possible,
on an overseas posting: an infantry unit where you are more
expeçted to lose your life than not.
But he is
at last.
healthy
Fhey Zcouldn't stop the good air and exercise and wholseome food
from sinking in, He disembarks in Algeria, in the blinding
summer sun, and his pale London skin succumbs to sunburn at once,
and he combines it with dysentery, thro ugh drinking at the tented
bar. He lies in the sweltering bivouac under the mospritef net
with KATHY's photograph at his side, looking at it again and again,
rushing off to the open air latrine in the noonday heat every
few minutes, sick and weak,


He embarks again, for Italy: again it seems that war will
evade him, since Italy has just signed an armistice, and Sicily is
in Allied hands. He lands at Salerne, on D-day plus 8, in the
dusk, and hears a man with red tabs on his shoulders (a brigadier)
telling a few men in a low voice,'I want you to go up to that road
fifty yards ahead and plonk yourselves down and stay there, even
if Jerry attacks, even if he walks over your bodies.' He thinks
this is a manoeurre. Even the mortar bombs that come whizzing
over he takes as dummy bombs. Only next day does he realise that
they are on a narrow strip of beach, with the Germans pushing them
into the sea. It is touch and go. But he seems to know nothing
about fear. He is gay, they nickname him the laughing boy.
He only flings himself to the ground at the whistle of a shell
because he sees the others doing it, Really his truancy has
still not ended. But it soon does.
His baptism of fire is really after the Salerno beackandat
situation has cleared up and they are advancing. The two men
he is with on a terraced vineyard are caught by schrapnel: one
dies, with holes in his back, A quick explosion and it was over.
War is quite different from what he expected. It is mostly quiet,
with sudden deafening noises, or a quick whizz and a death, in
a moment. It# is haphazard, you lose yourself all the time,
there seems to be notguiding principle. He cries whem the man
dies, standing with an old woman who shakes her head. That is
the moment of the death of his truancy: the laughing boy is dead
too. He looks longingly at the little photograph by his bed,
until it becomes just dots on a piece of paper, not a real face
any more.
A friedn writes to him that KATHY isbehaving 'strangely',
with other man: he doesn't know what JOHN knows, that their
affair is over.The friend says she wears a scark round her hair,
and trousers, like all the munitions girls, or rather like mun-
itions girls in the first war: she is ostentatiously unfeménine,
and communist. JOHN writes to her and gets no reply. He
realises he is quite alone. And in some way he must prove him-
self for her, or for some woman there might be in the future:
he begins to identify the war with his own struggle. At his
first attack, at the river Volturno, half the men turm back,
run away from the line. He vomits with fearas he runs in the
dark. He lies at the bottom of a vast shell-hole quivering
with terror as the German 'wailing Winny' hurls mortar bombs
over in handfullsof six, screaming across the night sky. He
can feel the trembling of the man next to him otees A man is
wounded above, cries out. Stretcher-bearers pass the lip of
the shellhole and call down for help: 'We've got wounded up
here, give us a hand you blokes, they're dying up here', while
the wounded man goes on crying,'No, please no, no!' But neither


JOHN nor the other man movd. He is a coward, When he and
two of his mates run up against a German sentry later that night,
having got into enemy lines by mistake, he proves this even more
by running away and not even pausing for the others, though one is
short and fat and carrying all the equipment. When they are rest-
ing after that attack he lies shivering in his bivouac unable to
sleep for fear of a shell dropping or a sudden attack, though this
isfive miles behind the lines. He tells the others this when they
areleating from their mess-1 tins, and one of them says with a smile,
'That's guilt!# They accept cowardice easily.
But these words change him, In the next attack his company
probe forward deep into the enemy line and take a house expos sed
to enemy fire on three of its sides. The officer is killed and
an enemy tank appears, but JOHN to his astonishment finds himself
rallying all to he men, going from one to the other asking them
if they want to be cowards: the gunners are missing, perhaps
wounded or lost, and only their signaller is there: he arranges
through the radio to bring down fire on the house itself, where
thef are sitting, to stop any attack from outside. The fire cer mes
down justcas the Germans begin their attack (which he predicted)
at dusk: miraculously they avoid the house itself but disperse
the Germans, six of whom surrender at the windows. He finds him-
self elevated to a non-commissioned officer, incharge of a platoon,
The story of what he did goes the rounds. They expect him to be
decorated, they finger the place on his jacket where his decoration
will be pinned. He doesn't smile. He is moreviolently unhappy
than he has ever been in his life.
This misery only lifts a week later, when he is standing at
the window of a farmhouse with a machine-gunner and a dozen Germans
appear at pointblank range hurrying across the field, ignorant of
the fact that they are being watched. The gunner is just about to
pull the trigger when JOHN lays his hand on his arm and shakes his
head silently. The Germans, stumbling and frightened, hurry away
to dafety. JOHN hears that snatch of conversation again in his
mind, 'Try it, in this war', and his reply,'I'll always try-'
(to be human). He realises what a deathly objective it is, to
try to prove yourself in war.
The war ends and he returns to greater bleakness tham before.
He remembers her 'Don't take this as final'. London is sad,
dirty, stripped of spirit. He phones from a kiosk where someone
has vomited, and the directories are_torn to shreds, the phone
itself almast hanging from its hingefs. He catiches sight of
KATHY in a crowd of students at the canteen where she goes:
she points him out to the man she is with, who looks at JOHN
inquisitively.
Then
they both turn away from him, the young


man with an embarrassed expression. JOHN is now an awkard,
thick-necked, impulsive person, unable to manage a real conversation,
always knocking things over, He hurried away. He knows that
KATHY is doing canvassing work for the labour party and tries to
get on the same group of streets, and follows her, but she always
evades him, It reminds him of deadly reconnoitring in the war.
She is at the corner of the street, looking womanly, collected,
smooth-faced, and them she is gone again. He gives up, exhausted.
He returns home to the snug little room overlooking the garden:
only this hasn't changed, The clock ticks in the same way.
The little school at the end of the road has been blown to bits.
The street has lost its windows several times. His parents give
a kind of party for him but he sits awkward and ungainly, not know-
ing any of the people, from across the road, from two doors away.
A married couple fight, she smacking his face, he wrenching her arm,
There is an air of misery. The older people look en, at a quite
new world, A piece of schrapnel has penetrated the back window,
and made a tiny hole. He stands there one morning peering at it,
fingering it, dreaming, thinking of the past, quite friendless now.
At that moment the post brings him a thick envelope: his mother
hands it to him, It tells him that he has been mentioned in
despatches for gallantty: it bears the king's facsimile signature.
He screws it up, and fingers the tiny hole.