And Again : The Scraper's Diary, Sunday Morning

Well, I did it, I got drunk.

But whenever I achieve a sudden ambition like that, I wish afterwards that I had not.

Perhaps that should be a lesson to me.

I'm sober again now, but last night - phew!

Mike and I went into the beer bar at 8.15; the party was not there, but a friendly bombardier invited us to help him drink some of the dozen or so glasses that were on the table. He had already emptied twenty. We accepted.

Here let me say that German glasses hold more than a half pint, and that the beer, which is chemical beer, is not so innocuous as it looks and tastes.

After four glasses, I lost count, and began to feel a little merry. My eyes needed reminding to focus on anyone, when I walked out, my legs needed coercing to obey me.

The waitress came up. I gave her a shilling and she brought back six more glasses, and then they stopped serving.

We drank on. I emptied about thirteen glasses, Mike about eight. By this time I was thoroughly, uproariously drunk. I could not stand straight. Every time I put my foot down the floor jumped up to meet it. Mike was unsteady on his pins too, and as he grew drunker, so an episode in the Y.M.C.A. grew funnier to him (the microphone fell off the stage), and he kept remembering it, and going into fits of laughter.

The place was nearly empty, and the attendants were urging us to leave; we emptied the last glasses, and I suddenly realized that I was going to be sick, so I lurched outside and vomited copiously. I felt much better then, and managed to walk back to the billet.

Soon after I reentered our room, I realized that I wanted to be sick again, so I opened the window and leaned out. I spewed the rest of the beer, and kept on retching long after my stomach was empty. Mike decided, ridiculously, to go for a walk, so he went. Fifteen minutes later, when he staggered back, I was still leaning out of the window, but in the meantime I had collapsed dizzily onto a bed and then gone to the window again.

With Mike's aid I staggered, almost unconscious, to the lavatory, where I stayed for fifteen minutes and emptied my stomach again and again. Then Mike helped me back again.

Don't imagine that he was sober, he was wimbling all over the place, but was in a better state than me.

Between us, we got me to bed, and I immediately fell sound asleep. My last words (so they say)

were "Never again".

When I was woken, after over eight hours deep slumber, I felt perfectly normal, with no hangover.

I have a dim recollection of reassuring Mike that a cigarette he put down was really going round and round, and also of the feeling that nothing was worth while. I wanted to die, my stomach and head were performing the most complicated rhumba, and my eyes seemed to be rolling in a complete circle.

Never again, Never, never again.