The War Years (Call-Up)

As the meteoric dust fell invincibly and insatiably on the early Caledonian Market furnishings of my room, I sat and waited for my call-up. . . A letter requiring my appearance before a medical board reached me in the first April of the war. . . I was fully prepared to march at the head of my men, an occupation in which I had had considerable practice, but the authorities were not having any of that. The moment I stood naked before the first doctor, Harley Street collapsed. I was surprised. My appearance was at half-mast. . . Many of my friends on seeing me thus would have cried out, 'Whatever's happened to you? " . . . even while I was merely having my eyes tested, I was told, 'You've dyed your hair. This is a sign of sexual perversion. Do you know what those words mean? " I replied that I did and that I was homosexual.

When I had been sitting alone in another part of the hessian forest for a few minutes, a young man appeared holding at arm's length, as though he were about to read a proclamation, a sheaf of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc. because I suffered from sexual perversion.

I was totally exempt.

I had assumed that the authorities would realize that, without my hair, the mandarin half of my fingernails and a few other detachable adornments, I would pass in the gunsmoke for an ordinary mortal, I was wrong and had now been given the most bottomless sack of all. I thought of myself as deprived by prejudice of a glorious and convenient death. I had absolutely no visible means of support.

When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, 'I don't much care for the expression "Suffering from", Shouldn't it be "glorying in"? '