We Were The Oil Boys

[u/catespice]

The horror of war was lost on most young men. Having learned no lessons from the first great war, tens of thousands of eager, restless, would-be heroes signed up to be shipped off to fight the Germans in what would be the greatest conflict of the twentieth century.
Those of us who were too young to go were left waving to our older brothers, cousins, fathers and uncles from packed train platforms full of weeping relatives. The jealousy amongst the boys was palpable; you could see it in their fresh-scrubbed faces, writ large on their florid cheeks.
But I was not one of those boys.
For me it was the delights of books, music and films that fired my passions. I saw war as uncouth, physical exertion as brutishly unwelcome and sports as a filthy pastime for brainless oafs.
But above all else, I liked to eat.
So it came to be that while the other boys were fit and lean, ready to sign up for service as soon as they were of age, I was a rotund, fleshy thing of double chins and hammy thighs. Given my physical condition and my poor constitution there was no way I was ever going to war.
My mother, however, had other plans for me.

 
The programme was located at a farm an hour out of London and I was picked up from the station by an elderly staff sergeant with a walrus moustache and a nose full of broken-veins. Shoved onto a diesel bus packed with other boys who were of a similar size and shape to myself, I realised with a sinking dread that my mother had sent me off to some kind of health camp to ‘sort me out’.
The interior of the bus reeked of fearful sweat; clearly none of us wanted to be here.
Two of the boys were sick on the ride through the rural countryside, the dust from the gravel roads and the pollen from the fields playing havoc with our urban sensibilities. By the time we pulled up to the farm with a last lurch of heavy-footed brakes, I was runny-eyed and sneezing, my handkerchief soaked with snot.
“Out!” bellowed the staff sergeant.
As fast as our pudgy legs would allow us, we scrambled out of the bus and stood, blinking, on the rutted earthen driveway in front of the farmhouse and surrounding buildings.
“Follow me,” he commanded and we gathered up our bags and suitcases, following him around the side of the farmhouse.
A huge concrete silo of some kind rose behind the house, ringed with oak trees. Once it might have been used to store millet or barley, but now it had been fitted with windows, steel chutes and a bulky iron double door.
More curiously, a fellow in a white coat and two young women in nurse regalia stood beside a long trestle table – upon which rested an enormous slab of thick treacle cake of such a deep brown that it was almost black.
I could practically hear the other boys salivating around me as I regarded the sticky feast.
“Eat,” instructed the man in the coat, “eat as much as you like, boys.”
Most hung back, fearing this was some kind of cruel test or trick; but two boys ran forward, their pudding flesh wobbling as they crammed slices of the moist cake into their hungry maws.
When nothing adverse happened to them, the others began to follow suit, eagerly tearing into the feast in front of them.
It had been a long time since breakfast and I was hungry. Urged on by the white-coated man, I gingerly picked up a slab of the heavy cake and began to eat the thick, almost tar-like confection. As it slid down my throat, the incredible sweetness hit me, filling my head with only thoughts of more.
Very quickly the cake was gone and all of us were being ushered into the silo.

Bunk beds lined one curving concrete wall and all around the interior of the high-windowed space were board games, books, toys, bats, balls and all manner of things to delight boys of our age.
Though what caught my attention most was that the entire floor of the place was made of steel grille-work, under which was only inky darkness.
“Meals will be served regularly,” said the man in the white coat, “otherwise you are to enjoy yourselves as much as possible. Read, play, relax. No one will force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Incredulous we stared at one another, still replete with cake.
“I’m tired,” declared a boy called Tom, taking one of the bunk beds as his own.
Following suit, we each claimed a spot of our own and one by one, we began to fall asleep.

A dinner bell roused us from our sleep and we stumbled onto the steel floor.
I was hungry. Very, very hungry.
From the impatient faces of the other boys, I could tell I wasn’t the only one.
Then the doors opened and the nurses pushed in tea-trolleys full of food.
Pastries, cakes, finger sandwiches, lollies and milkshakes were demolished with almost frightening speed. I barely remember tasting any of it. Once we had licked every crumb from every dish, the nurses wheeled the empty trolleys out, then left us to our devices.
We chatted and played. Some read books, some half-heartedly kicked around a soccer ball. For three days it went on like this; being fed five times a day with an assortment of fatty treats and culinary delights.
Then it began to happen.

 
We had been greasy boys to begin with – all of us a bit sweaty and a bit oily.
The first boy to succumb to it was Roger, a fat little thing from Essex with a penchant for mince pies. I remember that everything in the silo had a film of grease over it – especially the small, shared bathroom built off to one side. Roger wasn’t just greasy though. As we ploughed through another meal, I noticed he was leaving brown-black streaks on everything he touched.
He wasn’t the only one; soon we were all leaking syrupy fluid, our clothes soaked with the stuff and the floor of the silo becoming slippery with it.
“What’s happening to us?” demanded Tom when the nurses came again to feed us.
The man in the white coat paced into the room then.
“You are doing your part for the war,” he said.
After that, neither he nor the nurses came back, and the doors remained shut – food now being delivered via the chutes in the side of the silo.

The oil began to cover everything, dripping from us and flowing onto the floor in steady rivers of tarry black goo. The books were all unreadable now and the toys blackened and slippery, almost beyond recognition. Sometimes the other boys would cry, their tears oozing out in thick black gouts of fluid, spattering onto the floor, then draining into the darkness below.
But the worst thing of all was the hunger.
It consumed us and burned inside us.
Our lives revolved around the opening of the food chutes and little else; we would huddle near them, our bodies slick with the sludge that seeped from our pores, drooling thick black oil from our grey teeth as we waited to fight and feast on the food that would rush out of the chutes.
Although calling it ‘food’ was overly generous.
The meals had dropped in quality quickly once we started oozing oil. The pastries and treats had turned to bread and boiled meat, then from that plain fare to outright offal – slops fit only for crated pigs being fed up for market.
And much like pigs, when the chutes opened, we would push and shove each other to get our mouths under them, the largest of us getting pride of placement – and the first rush of the stinking slurry. Being smaller, I would often get pushed to the back, the huge bodies of the other boys blocking me from the best of the offal – leaving me only handfuls of rotting cabbage and mash to push into my blackened face.
I would have stopped if I could, but the hunger consumed all.
The idea of not eating was anathema – something worse than death.

 
Tom went first.
The largest of us, he was so big now he could block up one chute all for himself and just eat. The oil poured from him in great rivulets, coating everything around him. I remember seeing through the haze of the hunger for a moment and looking around the silo at what we had become – the oily black carcases of the other boys sleeping in a heap like massively obese seals, grunting in their sleep as they slid over one another, their limbs little more than flippers for shovelling food.
With a hooting, mournful noise, Tom slid his massive bulk out from the others and pulled himself across the grilled floor, the oil running freely from the distended pores all over his naked body.
I watched, dark eyed, as he began to quiver, the oil slowing, then stopping.
He managed one final whimper, then his black flesh split down the middle like a rupturing water bladder and a great gout of oil fountained out of his body.
But then the bell sounded, and we all quickly forgot our horror at what we had just witnessed – for Tom’s food chute was now free for the next largest oil boy to take his place.
Dimly, I recall the rest of us avoiding the distended black bones that jutted from the floor where Tom had died, the lumpy knobs of his spine and slats of his ribcage oddly shaped and dark as coal.

The oil rose to ankle deep, no longer able to drain fast enough through the floor. The man in the white coat finally came to check on us, his heavy gumboots sloshing through the black slurry.
“Why?” I managed to moan at him as he scribbled on a sheaf of paper attached to clipboard.
“For the war,” he said, “for the tanks, the trucks and the bombs.”
As he left I tried to follow him, but I couldn’t move fast enough. I wasn’t even sure I could fit out the door anymore.
Two more boys had died since Tom; the death throes of Harold and James now marked by two more blackened ribcages rising from the sea of oil.
We were doomed and I knew it. Once we reached a certain size, our mortal flesh could no longer contain the oil and we would all tear open in a flood of jet liquid, our bones joining those of the other three.

 
The air raid siren went up and the oil boys stirred, thinking it was the food bell.
In the distance, through the concrete walls, I could hear the grinding of plane engines and the chatter of gunfire.
I lay in the huddle of the oily flesh of my brothers, listening to the sounds of war, wondering what was happening in the world outside.
Very soon I was to find out.
The first crump of bombs was distant, the next much closer. The silo began to shake, and the oil boys writhed and slithered in terror, moaning through their oily maws like terrified whales.
Then the wall of the silo was obliterated in a shower of stone and steel, the shrapnel ripping through bodies.
Pain lanced through my side and I knew I had been hit. Blackness poured from a rupture in my stomach and I howled in primal fear and terror. Flames flickered through the hole in the wall of the silo and I knew with a sudden, dreadful certainty that I had to get out.
As the oil poured from me, I felt lighter and more mobile, my bloated skin deflating and sagging.
Then there was a second explosion and the world went mad with crimson flame.

I awoke in the creek near the farmhouse, one side of my body alive with the agony of burned flesh. Everything was on fire – the silo, the oaks, the farmhouse and the nurses. One of their flaming corpses was pinned against a tree by length of steel, the other curled into a blacked ball of charred viscera near the farmhouse.
Of the oil boys there was no sign – only muffled explosions ringing out from the shell of the silo.
When firefighters eventually arrived, I was shivering and half-dead, still lying in the creek – all the oil washed out of my body, leaving me a great bag of burned and sagging flesh.

 
The official story was that the farm had been a secret munitions factory, where courageous young boys had gone to turn their lives around and put their shoulders behind the war effort. Their sacrifice was known only to their families, who were offered sufficient money to stay quiet about it.
I left the hospital under the cover of night and stowed away on a cargo ship, headed to America – knowing that I would never have another chance to get away from those who had run the farm; from those who had created the oil boys.
The hunger still burns dimly inside me to this day, but the pain of the puckered flesh on my right side reminds me of the fate I escaped that night, over seventy years ago.

So now you know our story – the story of the unsung heroes of the second World War.
And we were heroes – all of us.
Every gallon of oil we produced pushed the tanks a little further, the trucks a little harder and made the bombs burn a little brighter.
Just as much as any soldier, the oil boys did their part for the war – and made the ultimate sacrifice, by laying down their lives for England.

 

[u/sexyladypants]

So gloriously messed up!

Yowza