4 SEPTEMBER 1982, Page 23

Unleavened

Robert Stewart

A Soldier's View of Empire. The Reminiscences of James Bodell, 1831-92. Keith Sinclair (ed.) (The Bodley Head £7.95)

We all know the type. He left home at 16 to join the army, travelled to the far corners of the earth, and saw and did many things. The tales he could tell! And does, browbeating us in the local with stories of bawds stormed and perils averted. Ah, and he has (don't we know) a book in him, if only he could find the words.

James Bodell entered the army against the objections of his father,.a pacifist Char- tist of a stocking knitter, to escape from Nottinghamshire poverty and have a go at the world. First posted to Ireland, he spent the next thirty years of his life as an occa- sional soldier and fortune-seeker in the out- posts of Queen Victoria's empire. In his middle-fifties he set himself down to write the memoirs of his snakes-and-ladders life. He had had three years of schooling, per- functory we may be sure. He was not a reader of books. Yet somehow, remarkably, he had the words. See how he begins.

After many years of thoughtful con- sideration I have taken upon myself the onerous task to put into writing the ex- periences, incidents, and adventures of my Travels, during a period of 38 years from the Year of Grace 1847 to the pre- sent year 1885. During the first year mentioned I was a youth, ignorant and inexperienced of the difficulties and hardships a young man of my small at- tainments who had taken upon himself to face the troubles of this world. I hope my readers will forgive any short com- ings they may detect in the Compilation of this Narrative.

Grammarians will sharpen their nitpicking nails on the incomplete sentence; lovers of the strength and beauty of unaffected English prose will take delight from the economy and poise of proper words in pro- per places. The editor of these remin- iscences has done a bit of tidying, but if, as he tells us, he has done little more than cor- rect some mis-spellings and supply some full stops, then he is wrong to say that to have published the manuscript unaltered would have served merely to demonstrate that a common soldier was not very literate. For the most striking quality of these memoirs is the clarity of the writing. By the force and honesty of its uncluttered sentences, and by its freedom from conven- tional phraseology, Bodell's prose is equal to the demands of simple pathos. On the voyage to China a young woman's husband is killed by an accident on deck. The news is kept from her. 'But in a short time, she knew something unusual was the matter, and she went aft and found out the awful truth. She poor Woman went nearly mad. All night she was pleading to see her poor Husand but was not allowed, as the Sight of the body in the fearful condition it was would have made her worse'. Where did he find the words? Perhaps he did not need to. Perhaps he was lucky to have been born in a time when a man's literary style, written or oral, was still the fruit of his own ex- perience, and therefore the stern mark of his understanding, not the anonymous language drawn from our stagnant well of `media' English defiled.

Still, the sturdy virtues of the prose are not beguiling, and no reader, I imagine, will be borne along to the last pages of this book by the magic of the hand that wrote them. Nor, I doubt, by any other cause. There is no lack of incident. Bodell was in Hong Kong when the great fire destroyed the Chinese section of Victoria in 1851 and he walked among the ruins, ankle deep in dollars, gazing on the charred remains of hundreds of cats and dogs. He made money quickly — the astonishing amount of £3,000 net one year — and lost it quickly in building hotels and manufacturing brew for the gold prospectors of Australia. He took part, not much of a part, in the savage (and still too lightly passed over) wars against the Maoris in the Waikato and Tauranga districts of New Zealand. But men of action are bores. No man's experiences, however distinctive they seem to be in outward ap- pearance, differ much from another's. Wit alone lends charm to the telling of them; a reflective intelligence alone imparts to them moral interest. Bodell's narrative wants such yeasts.