They needed replacements, more cannon fodder, more young men for butcher meat. I wanted no part in it. I would categorically refuse to go.

  There was a long table by the far wall, beneath a framed photograph of His Majesty the King. Behind the table sat four men. They ignored me as I came into the room, continued their muttered conversation. Facing the table, in the middle of the floor, was a single straightbacked hard wooden chair. I stood behind it, waited. Eventually one of the four, the oldest – stiff wing-collar, pince-nez pinching his nose, thin hair brilliantined to his scalp – looked up and glared at me.

  Name?

  Blyth, I said. Reginald Horace.

  He looked down at a sheet of paper in front of him, ran his finger down a list of names, stopped.

  Address?

  93 Trumpington Road.

  Date of birth?

  December 3rd, 1898.

  Which makes you, by my reckoning, eighteen years and two days old.

  Yes sir.

  You are therefore, under the terms of the Military Service Act, liable for conscription into His Majesty’s Service.

  Yes sir. Indeed.

  Indeed, he repeated.

  I closed my eyes, took in a long, deep breath, continued.

  However…

  Yes?

  Time passed, then I came out with it, blurted it all-in-a-rush.

  I wish to be excused from active military service.

  I became intensely aware of the heavy ticking of an old clock on the wall, sombre in its mahogany case.

  On what grounds?

  I cleared my throat, articulated my words carefully.

  I have a conscientious objection to the war.

  Again he glared.

  You have no medical condition that would render you unfit to serve?

  No sir.

  He banged the table, startled the others, made me jump.

  Damn it man! What is wrong with you?

  Bloody coward, said one of the others. Damned disgrace.

  He was redfaced, neck bulging over his collar. A caricature, a Colonel Blimp. I expected him to hand me a white feather, a denunciation. Instead he hissed out Spineless!

  As if in response, I drew myself up, stood to attention.

  Sit! said the first man, nodding towards the chair, and I did.

  Before I could settle, he said, Are you a religious man, Mr Blyth?

  I…

  Speak up, man! said redface.

  Perhaps not in the accepted sense of the term, sir.

  God give me strength!

  I am sure he will, sir, if you pray to him wholeheartedly.

  If you are being insolent, the man said, you will be held in contempt.

  That was not my intention, I said. Sir.

  Well answer the question! Yes or No?

  It comes back to me now, down almost fifty years, this exchange, this interview, this interrogation, inquisition, clear in my memory, word perfect as a scene in a play.

  Are you a religious man, Mr Blyth, Yes or No?

  It was like the old lawyer’s question – Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Answer yes or no. Whatever way you answered was wrong. A hiding to nothing.

  It was what I would now call a koan. Does a dog have the Buddha-nature? Yes or No.

  I am not a church-goer, I said. But I believe there is much truth in the scriptures.

  Much truth? said the first man.

  The teachings of Christ are exemplary, I said. Blessed are the peacemakers.

  And you regard yourself as a peacemaker.

  I’m a pacifist, sir. I had hoped I was making that clear.

  What do you actually do to further peace? Or is your attitude the only peaceful thing about you?

  I speak out, sir. Like this.

  Are you some kind of revolutionary? A Bolshevik?

  No sir.

  What books do you read?

  Apart from the New Testament! said redface.

  I read widely, I said.

  What books in particular?

  At the moment I am especially fond of Dickens.

  What else?

  Wordsworth, Stevenson, Marcus Aurelius, Blake, Matthew Arnold, George Bernard Shaw…

  Are you trying to impress us with your erudition?

  Emerson, Thoreau, Milton, Keats…

  I’m surprised you have time for anything else.

  George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Clare…

  Enough! said redface.

  And all this…reading… said the chairman, pronouncing the word with something akin to distaste… has led you to the noble conclusion that it is wrong to defend your country against a savage and brutal enemy?

  I don’t believe mass bloodshed is the answer.

  The other two men, both thin-faced and nondescript, had not yet spoken, but they suddenly joined in, a double-act, battering me with their rapid-fire questions.

  Are you afraid of having to fight? Is that it?

  What would you do if you yourself were attacked?

  What would you do if your mother and father were attacked?

  If you had children, who would defend them?

  Would you rather be defeated than use force?

  I don’t know, I said. I truly do not know. These are difficult questions for anyone to answer.

  So what gives you the certainty that your thinking and your feelings are right?

  Are you a sheep, Mr Blyth? Or do you see yourself as a lion, or a lone wolf?

  Sorry?

  Do you see yourself as a follower, or a leader, or a solitary?

  All of those, I said. None of them.

  Are you prevaricating, Mr Blyth? Are you being wilfully obstructive?

  They say that of all the senses, smell is the most evocative in terms of bringing back a memory, conjuring up a remembered scene – the particular moment, vivid and distinct. How it was. So now, some five decades on, it’s the scent of the room I recall – the fustiness of the old worn carpet, furniture polish from the heavy oak table, metallic tang of Brasso from the fittings, and overlaying it all, the cloying musk of stale tobacco. Any of these can pitch me back to that dreary committee room in Leytonstone on a cold December afternoon. They reawaken a sense of bleakness, and apprehension, and fear.

  There was a brief silence. The older man, the chairman of this ad hoc tribunal, looked down at the piece of paper in front of him, unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and scribbled something at the foot of the page. Then he fixed me with his gaze, unmistakably hostile.

  Mr Blyth, he said. Are you prepared to go to prison for your beliefs?

  The smell of the room. The hard wooden chair. The cold.

  Yes, I said. I am fully prepared.

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close.

  Wormwood Scrubs. The Scrubs. I always heard it like that, in a broad Cockney accent. Dahn the Scrubs.

  That wonderful old character actor from British comedies in the black-and-white Fifties, Ealing comedies. I watched them in a film club in Shinjuku, a smoky dive that didn’t even aspire to being a flea-pit. I watched and I laughed and was overwhelmed by a ludicrous nostalgia for something I’d never known.

  What was the actor’s name? A boxer’s pug-face, battered and resilient.

  Arthur Mullard. That was it! Arthur Mullard! A name and a character worthy of Dickens at his best. An Alfred Jingle, perhaps. Or a Bill Sikes.

  Dahn the Scrubs.

  Jack Dawkins, the Artful. Chameleon poet shocking the virtuous philosophers. Sent down by the magistrates and railing at them. You’ll pay for this my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something! Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!

  Never was a character so full of life. So full of Zen.

  There’s the word again, rearing its head. What is this thing called Zen?

  I had said I was fully prepared. But how could I have been prepared?

  A stinking, straw-filled mattress, no more than two inches thick, stretched over bare boards and covered by a coarse blanket. A wooden stool. No table but a built-in shelf. A hole in the door with a shutter that slid open at floor level so the food could be passed through, though calling it food would be an exaggeration. Rations were meagre enough anyway. (Don’t you know there’s a war on?) The best on offer would be a bowl of indeterminate murky sludge that purported to be stew. But for vegetarians like me, it was even worse. Breakfast was a thin porridge, no more than a gruel, like diluted wallpaper paste, doused with sour milk. Lunch was a bowl of tepid scummy soup. Dinner would be a few potatoes in a watery gravy (a watery grave!) and a hunk of stale bread scraped with a thin smear of rancid margarine.

  Glorious food.

  Oliver.

  Back to Dickens again – I keep circling round him.

  The last was a S, Swubble I named him. This was a T, Twist I named HIM.

  Mister Bumble the Beadle.

  So the food in the Scrubs was grim, no other word for it. I make light of it, but people sickened, some died. I was robust and I made the best of it, I survived. It was possible by working overtime to earn extra rations – a mug of cocoa, another chunk of hard bread to dunk in it.

  I have always prided myself (and pride is the very least of my besetting sins) on the clarity of my memory. If I read a passage that interested or affected me, it would stay, lodged or filed away until I called it to mind, or it came to me unbidden for who-knows-what reason.

  They call it photographic memory, but that is not quite accurate, suggests only the visual. This faculty is also auditory, olfactory. It can be triggered by a scent. The smell of that fusty committee room that came back to me just then. Or a taste. Dark chocolate. I’m like Monsieur Proust with his famous madeleine – one taste and he was transported to his childhood, dipping sweet cake in a cup of tisane.

  Dunk.

  A good word.

  Spongecake in tea. Stale bread in cocoa.

  Some things I remember in the depths of my being, in my very cells. I reinhabit a place, a time. I am there.

  In my cells.

  The Scrubs.

  There was a garrulous Scotsman in the cell next to mine. The first night he shouted out a joke.

  Did ye hear about the lonely prisoner?

  He was in his cell!

  It worked in his Glasgow accent. In his sel’. In his self.

  It took me a moment or two to get it, but when I did, I laughed.

  He spoke to me the next day as we queued to slop out our own waste down the communal sewer. The stink was overpowering.

  Pish and shite, he said, emptying his chamber pot. That’s what they feed us. Slop in, slop out. You’ll also find it’s the two languages most folk speak in here. If they’re not talking pish they’re talking shite.

  I made some kind of noncommittal grunt.

  But you, my friend, he said, strike me as an intelligent man.

  Thank you, I said, not knowing how else to respond.

  Robertson’s the name, he said. Davie Robertson.

  Blyth, I said. Reginald.

  He laughed.

  Quite a moniker! I’ll call you Reg, then.

  He held out right hand, the empty chamber pot in his left. He saw me glance at it and hesitate, and again he laughed, wiped the free hand on his overalls, held it out again. We’re all in it, he said, and I shook his hand, the grip firm.

  Reg.

  Davie.

  All in it.

  Right in it!

  Picking oakum was as wretched and tedious a job as it sounded. For me It harked back again to Oliver Twist – the boys in the workhouse were set the selfsame task, and told it was serving their country.

  This was a B, Blyth I named HIM.

  The oakum was a tarry fibre used in shipbuilding for caulking timbers, wadding the deck planks.

  We sat on hard benches at long wooden tables and worked for hours unravelling old tarred ropes and cordage, painstakingly unpicking and taking them apart, separating out the fibre that could be used.

  Robertson took me to task for it, said I was assisting the war effort. He was an absolutist and refused to do any work that supported the war machine, directly or indirectly.

  I had never encountered such intensity of purpose, and I admired him for it.

  It was an imperialist war, he said. The ruling classes made the war, but the workers had to fight it. I would fight for a cause I believed in, he said. But not this. Not this.

  As well as picking oakum, we made mailbags, stitched the rough canvas with thick twine using sailmakers’ needles that were often blunt. There were no thimbles or hand-guards and our fingers first blistered then calloused as they hardened to the work. Sometimes after a long shift my hands would clench, go into spasm as if arthritic.

  All for an extra hunk of bread, a mug of cocoa.

  Dunk.

  Glorious food.

  Robertson and I were joined by another outcast, another Objector, by the name of Archie Bishop. Perhaps surprisingly, he was a butcher by trade and had even worked in a slaughterhouse. One of the guards berated him.

  Wouldn’t have thought you’d be squeamish, mate. I thought spilling blood would come natural.

  That’s it exactly, said Bishop. I’ve killed pigs, and I know how that feels, and I’m damned if I’m going to kill men.

  The three of us were utterly different in character, but we bonded together in a kind of solidarity. The conshies.

  Three became four with a new arrival, even younger than me (by a matter of weeks).

  We were pointed out to him, and he came and sat at our table. Introductions were made, each to each. His name was Paul Dickson.

  All right young fella, said Robertson, tell us your story.

  I was called up on my eighteenth birthday, said the boy. The very day. And I said I had a conscientious objection to the war.

  As we all do, said Robertson. As any sane person would.

  So the chairman says, how old are you Mister Dickson? I says, Eighteen sir. Then you are clearly not old enough to have a conscience, he says. Dismissed.

  That’s a bloody disgrace, said Robertson. An outrage. Did you protest?

  I got as far as But… said the boy, and they said I would be held in contempt. I opened my mouth again and they had me taken out and brought here.

  Bastards, said Robertson.

  Robertson liked to tease me about being vegetarian. He could understand it as a philosophical position, and even as a a political statement.

  Your man Shaw, he said, puts the case very well. Animals are his friends, and he’s not in the habit of killing and eating his friends.

  That’s certainly memorable, I said, if a little sentimental.

  Hark at you! said Robertson. So what’s your argument?

  I believe he said he chose not to make a graveyard of his body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

  Very persuasive!

  He also said – and here I tried to intone the words in an Irish accent – A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nourishment from cows.

  Robertson laughed. He’s not one for hiding his light, is he?

  He spoke out against the War, I said, and has been much criticised for it.

  He said one side was as bad as the other, and he wasn’t far wrong.

  So you agree with him about that but not about vegetarianism?

  Ach, said Robertson. It’s all well and good in theory. But in practice, I don’t see how it could be made to work.

  It would take time, I said. Like most good things. Like the universe itself.

  He laughed. I may not agree with you on this, but I like your style!

  And Mr Shaw’s?

  And Mr Shaw’s.

  Next day at the mid-day mealtime in the canteen, I had brought a little note. I had copied it, from memory, on a scrap of paper I’d salvaged from a bin, written with a blunt stub of pencil I’d picked up in the prison library.

  It’s Mr Shaw at his most persuasive, I said, and I read.

  We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate women’s hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases.

  You trying to put me off my food? said Robertson. Then he laughed and shovelled another spoonful into his mouth, from his bowl of ‘stew’ he admitted was mostly gravy and gristle.

  Mind you, he said, It wouldn’t take much!

  Robertson had a way with words, and he wrote a limerick for me.

  There was a young fellow named Reg

  Who was frequently heard to allege:

  ‘Eating meat is a crime

  Without reason or rhyme

  And that’s why I eat nothing but veg.’

  He wrote about the others too, Archie Bishop and Paul Dickson.

  A butcher named Bishop, one night

  Replied when they asked him to fight,

  ‘I’ve killed pigs, it’s no joke

  And I won’t kill a bloke.

  I’m sorry, it just isn’t right.’

  Couldn’t find a rhyme for Archie! said Bishop. But he laughed, delighted with it. And young Dickson was just as pleased with his verse.

  There was a young conshie named Paul

  Who refused to answer the call

  To take up arms,