Good Enough For Nelson (21 page)

‘I should have thought your father would have answered that for you.’

‘Do you get fulfilment out of it?’

‘Do you get fulfilment out of your exercises?’

‘It’s a way of life.’

‘So is ours, a way of life.’

‘A way of death, you mean.’

‘Tell you what, after this is all over, would you come and have...’

‘There you are Ikey!’ It was Debby Jerningham, dragging after her a smaller, blonder version of herself. ‘Been looking for you. Penny, this is Ikey. Ike this is Penny, my cousin. She and I used to run a cookery business together. I used to do the cooking, Penny used to chat up the customers. She simply adores naval officers.’

‘What, on toast, do you mean?’ said Isaiah Nine Smith weakly.

‘What very strange Christian names you have,’ said Penny. ‘Well,’ said Isaiah Nine Smith, conscious that Lucy too was listening closely. ‘My parents were Plymouth Brethren. Very devout. They named me after a text in Isaiah. All about Unto us a son is born, unto us a child is given. It comes from Isaiah, chapter nine. So, Isaiah Nine.’

‘How
sweet
! ‘

‘I suppose I was lucky not to be called Wonderful, Counsellor. Because that’s how the verse goes on, his name shall be wonderful counsellor. WC Smith I should have been.’

‘Do you know,’ said Penny, ‘our paths have crossed before!’ Penny, it transpired, had an encyclopaedic memory for faces, names places and occasions. She led them through the Court Circular, sections of the Navy List and Kelly’s Directory, the MCC fixture list, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition catalogue, British Rail time-tables, Pan American scheduled flights to New York, by way of Wimbledon, Wisden, Wisley, Bisley, Burleigh, Hurlingham, Henley, Farnborough, Shugborough, Braemar and Tamar, and finally back to Dartmouth, satisfied that she had at last established that Isaiah Nine Smith had once received an invitation to one of her flatmate’s weddings in Guildford but had not been able to attend. Breathlessly she moved away and Isaiah Nine Smith turned back to Lucy.

‘As I was saying...’

‘Ikey!’ It was Hilda, with her unmarried second cousin from Wigtownshire, who bred and talked about Cavalier King Charles spaniels. ‘They’re allowed anywhere, you know,’ she said reverently. ‘It’s the law, you can’t stop them. It’s because of King Charles, you see.’

‘Let me try again...’ Isaiah Nine Smith said to Lucy. But then it was June, the short-story writer, with another unmarried writing friend from Totnes, who talked about her uncle’s last illness. Then The Bodger laid a firm hand on Isaiah Nine Smith’s shoulder. ‘I’ve got a prospective parent here, who needs a bit of reassuring. Come and keep her morale up by talking about what we do here. Remember to tell her we’re a compassionate society nowadays. We don’t often have floggings these days, and not many people get keel-hauled in the course of the average commission.’

‘Coming right away, sir. Lucy, would you like to have a meal with me after this?’

‘Provided you don’t talk about Zen Buddhism and meditational positions.’

‘OK, provided
you
don’t talk about the Navy and Dartmoor and all that.’

‘OK then.’

‘OK.’

The Bodger was talking to an instructor lieutenant commander known to everybody at the College as Beaky; he was a lecturer in naval history and political theory, and June’s husband. ‘To use a horrible trendy phrase, sir,’ Beaky was saying, ‘I quite often experience a crisis of identity these days.’

Beaky, who had been the Schoolie in the old
Superb
, would never be promoted and he knew it. He did not resent his wife’s success which he did not feel diminished him. He was not an ambitious man and he often reassured himself that being passed over had not hurt him. But now and again he did feel the twinges of longing for what might have been, like the prickling ache of a long-amputated limb.

‘Sometimes I wonder, am I a naval officer or a schoolmaster? Because I ought to be able to be both. I teach an academic subject in a properly academic way, I hope, and yet I’m looking forward and backwards over my shoulder all the time at what the Service requires. It is impossible to be in the Navy and to ignore its effects on one as a scholar. I like to think of myself as being a scholar still at heart. But it seems impossible to be a naval scholar. The Service is all-pervasive and I’m very much afraid all-powerful, all-conquering. Whenever I give way just the least bit, the Navy quietly flows in and fills up the space. And I never get that space back, hard though I try and push. I used to have one or two pet research subjects. I have not worked on them for years. I used to correspond with one or two people I was up at Cambridge with. Not now.’

As always when he talked to Beaky, The Bodger had the idea that Beaky was saying something very profound but he could never understand what it was.

‘Here am I, sir, preaching an upper-class, elitist way of life and gospel, in which incidentally I sincerely believe and which I support whole-heartedly, to young men who are more orientated to a lower-middle-class or even working-class ethos. Sometimes they look at me as though I’m talking Hottentot. Yet we must be elitist. There never was a time when we ought to scrap our present line of advertising which gives the impression that what we want is a new class of officers who are like socially presentable bureaucrats with a taste for occasional helicopter flying. I think we ought to advertise for boys whose fathers were naval officers. Join the family firm, we ought to be saying. I really do, sir, quite honestly, I do. We’ve gone too far the other way. One lad was telling me the other day that his schools careers’ master warned him that when he went up for the Admiralty Interview board he should not on any account volunteer the fact that his father was a naval officer. If it cropped up in conversation, he was to play the subject down. It would be no help at all, and probably a disadvantage, he was told. Talk about a crisis of identity. That poor chap doesn’t know who he is or whether he’s coming or going. He is his father’s son. He can’t help it, and yet he is not supposed to acknowledge it.’

‘Who was that? Do you mind telling me?’

‘Chap called Persimmons, sir. He’s a good little lad but I think he’s rather finding the College a bit much for him. But to go on with my point. In the old days there was a place for everybody and everybody or almost everybody was in his place. Nowadays, you get a working-class lad coming here, to what must be, externally anyway, one of the last bastions of privilege left in England, with a steward to clean up his cabin and stewards to serve him his meals. No wonder he blows his top a bit. He either becomes aggressively working-class, stressing his accent and his background and asking, for instance, where’s the bath so that he can put his coal in it...’

‘Has anybody actually
asked
that?’

‘Oh yes, sir, some Welsh midshipman. As I say, sir, he either becomes aggressively working-class or he becomes excessively upper-class, cultivating a far-back accent...’

‘A
what
accent?’

‘Far-back, sir. It’s their word for the way you and I speak, sir.’

‘Good God! ‘

As usual, The Bodger was left with the impression that Beaky had been saying something important, although he could not remember what it was. However, his phrase ‘a crisis of identity’ stuck, and it came up again the next day, when as The Bodger said, history was made: the first lecture on how to appear on television was given at the Britannia Royal Naval College.

Amazingly, on The Bodger’s enquiries, it turned out there was indeed a department in the Ministry of Defence which dealt with what was termed ‘media presentation’. It seemed that nobody, before The Bodger, had ever heard of them or telephoned them or got in touch with them in any way; they were therefore surprised, and delighted, and flattered, and promised to send down their media consultant, and his presentation team.

This personage, whom The College at once nicknamed Superjack, had frizzy black Afro-style hair, a red leather jerkin decorated with brass studs radiating in a design like flaming sun, tight faded blue jeans, and leather boots with high cuban heels. The Bodger had last met him when he was Torpedo Officer in the old
Superb
. He had retired prematurely, but voluntarily, and was now, he told The Bodger, a media advisory consultant with his own agency, on contract to the Ministry of Defence.

‘I advise managing directors and MPs and anyone who is likely to go on the goggle-box or who would like to be invited to go on it. Funnily enough, that includes senior army, navy and air force officers. A few of them hate any kind of personal publicity. A few adore it. But most really can’t be doing with it, but feel that they have to play along with it. They’ve seen the benefits it can bring to those who can play .the media game properly, and they hope that if they can do it right, they will unleash a shower of golden dollars. Poor dears, they really do have a crisis of identity. Imagine admirals taking lessons on how to appear best on the idiot’s lantern! Whatever next, I do hear Nelson ask!’

Superjack gave his lecture in the Hall, with the whole College present, the Prof. sitting in frozen disapproval in the front row. He brought his own cinema projector which was set up and operated by his presentation team, who were two redheads in flowered silk pyjama suits. They moved around the Hall with a delicious rustling, leaving whiffs of haunting perfume, and the College gazed enviously on them, assuming that Superjack exercised some kind of
droit de seigneur
over them. Many of the College were so taken by the red-heads that they missed Superjack’s opening remarks.

‘... So to appear on television, you must watch television. Next time you see a politician, or a pop star or a union leader or anybody being interviewed watch what they say and how they say it, what they do and how they do it. Then try to analyse your feelings. Did he sound convincing? Was he entertaining, or interesting or informative? Or was he dull, unconvincing, or unintelligible? If so, why? And if not, why not? Because there are certain tricks of the trade.

‘Television rewards those who take trouble over it. It’s no good being bored with it, or off-hand with it, or snooty about it. If you want something from it, you’ve got to give something. You say it’s no part of a naval officer’s duty to appear effective on TV. I say it is. You may be able to do the Navy a power of good one day, just by giving a good TV performance.

‘When someone’s asking you questions, look the questioner in the eye, but not all the time. Look away while answering, but make sure you are once more looking directly at him when you reach the end of your answer. So that it will appear that you have said your piece honestly and fully. It doesn’t really matter what you actually
say
, it’s what you
appear
to be saying that’s important.

‘Remember that, basically, TV producers don’t really like the Navy or any of the armed services. Deep down, they feel guilty about them, because they were too young to do National Service themselves. This gives an extra edge to their approach to the forces. You have to remember that BBC TV producers all had to endure those boring stories about what their daddies did at Dunkirk or in the Western Desert.’

Listening, it struck The Bodger that perhaps Superjack, too, had a certain edge in his approach.

‘Some interviewers have a trick of escalating the difficulty of successive questions. Like taking a horse round a show-jumping ring, with each jump just a little bit higher than the one before. Say, for example, you are being interviewed about an old World War Two mine that some fisherman has just swept up in his net. You have just come round with your mine disposal team in a Land Rover and you’ve just defused the thing or towed it out to sea and detonated it. You did the job all right and everything’s fine. But the interviewer says, “Why did you come round by road, surely it would have been quicker to have come by helicopter?” And, supposing for the sake of argument, you had used a helicopter, he will then ask “Why did it take two hours to get there instead of only one?” And if it had taken only one hour, he would have asked, “Why didn’t it have a crew of twelve on board?” And if you did have a crew of twelve, he would have asked “Why wasn’t one of them a fully qualified Harley Street brain surgeon?” And so on. Nobody ever stops to think why on earth
should
there be a crew of twelve or a Harley Street brain surgeon, or why should there be a helicopter at all if a Land Rover was just as good and just as quick? The viewer is left with the impression that he has been watching an intrepid BBC TV interviewer once again uncovering Ministry of Defence bumbledom.

‘If you get a really hostile question, a real dirty one, it sometimes helps to reel back on the ropes, and then rebound again. You can repeat the question, to show that you’re not afraid of its implications. In a way, repeating it helps to deflate it, defuse it, show it as somehow unreasonable, even ridiculous. For example, he may say to you, “Don’t you think the Navy is an anachronistic, class-ridden, and very expensive white elephant these days?” You begin your reply by saying, “No, I don’t think the Navy is an anachronistic, class-ridden and very expensive white elephant,” repeating him word for word, and then you go on to say that on the contrary, you think that the Navy is an extremely modern, up-to-date, democratic institution which gives extremely good value for money.

‘Now,’ said Superjack, ‘have a look at this,’ He nodded at the red-heads, and on the screen flashed a picture of the head and shoulders of a man. The sound had been turned down and there was just a moving picture of a man’s talking head, obviously answering a series of questions from some interviewer off screen. He was speaking, pausing, speaking again. But he was also ducking his head, as though trying to avoid a blow, gnawing his lower lip, looking sharply away and down as though something on the floor had frightened him, putting his tongue in his cheek and thoughtfully chewing it, licking his lips, scratching his nose. His face was only very faintly familiar.

When the screen went blank, Superjack asked, ‘Would you buy a second-hand boat from that man? Anybody know who that was?’