Good Enough For Nelson (3 page)

The window panes rattled tinnily. The GI was still in action. ‘That rather fierce GI down there, Jimmy, what’s his name?’

‘Him? That’s Petty Officer Pounter.’

‘I don’t
believe
it!’

‘Quite a naval family. His father was a GI, too. Got two brothers, one a master-at-arms, the other a sergeant in the Marines. Makes you wonder what the hell their mother fed them on, doesn’t it? Shall we have a wander round, Bodger, and I’ll show you some of the menagerie?’

The Bodger was still marvelling at the revelation of Pounter’s identity. ‘It’s nice to know such families still exist,’ he said. But for a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, The Bodger suddenly felt stout, and slow, and
old
. Like Sassoon’s scarlet major at the base, he could now say of a young man, ‘used to know his father well’.

Petty Officer Pounter’s assistant of the moment was an officer from a foreign navy. The Bodger had looked at the lists before he came and he knew that there were normally officers of some sixteen or seventeen different nationalities under training at Dartmouth at any given time. They did broadly the same course, with allowances made for language difficulties and special national requirements.

This young man was short and swarthy and looked rather overweight. He marched with an ungainly, unmilitary waddling gait which the pastel-blue, lightweight cloth of his baggy uniform accentuated. The Bodger could not recognise the uniform or the cap badge.

Jimmy had followed The Bodger’s gaze. ‘He’s one of the Internationals. What the Chief’s Mess call “our tinted friends”. Normally known here collectively and botanically as the Royal Gromboolian Navies.’

‘Mr Syllabub, sir!

Petty Officer Pounter’s exquisite diction and carefully enunciated consonants rolled across the parade ground like heavy rocks plunging into a lily pool.

‘Mr Syllabub, sir!’ Like many of the British petty officers, Pounter could not get his tongue round some of the foreign names and had to arrive at his own phonetic approximation. ‘There may be a word for you in your language, Mr Syllabub, sir, but shall I tell what you look like from where I’m standing ‘ere? Yore marching like you had two hairs in your arse tied together, sir!’

The phrase’s perfect description of Syllabub’s action distracted The Bodger for some time from the enormity of the insult.

‘Don’t they
mind
that sort of thing?’

‘No,’ said Jimmy, ‘not a bit. They love it. Lap it up, dear boy, positively lap it up. They think it’s all part of our system, and that’s what they’re paying for. They’d be disappointed if they didn’t get the whole works. Rather like the graduate officers from university when they first came here. Because they were a bit older and a damned sight better educated than the College was used to, there was a tendency rather to fight shy of them and treat them with kid gloves. Never had so many
brains
in the College before, and there was a feeling they shouldn’t run about so much. Might be bad for them or something. But
they
were vaguely disappointed. Felt they were missing something, in some way. So now we treat everybody in the same appalling way. Of course, you’ve got to remember that Pounter’s a bit of a character, and he knows it, and he knows you’re watching. He has a reputation to live up to. You should have seen him last term when he had a squad of padres here. My goodness he used to chase them up and down that parade ground, shrieking “Onward Christian
sailors
, sir!”.’

‘Well,’ said The Bodger. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’

‘Actually, we’ve got three new Gromboolian Navies here this term. It’s a bit of an experiment for them. Very sensitive politically. At least, how to pull off a military coup and take over the government isn’t on the syllabus here, as it seems to be at Sandhurst. But seriously, everybody on our side is anxious that they are happy. Don’t want them to go behind the Iron Curtain. If they do, if they’re unhappy, then certain heads will roll. It may have a bearing on the future of this College, too. Perhaps if we can prove our usefulness at training foreign officers, they’ll let us carry on training our own.’

Jimmy looked at his watch. The Bodger recognised it.

‘Didn’t your Mama give you that for giving up smoking when we were mids together?’

‘That’s the one. And I’m still smoking like a chimney. More so since I got here.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘Bodger, it’s a battlefield. You wait and see. Now what shall we rush at first? What would you like to see?’

‘Everything.’

‘Make it so. Everything it is.’

The Bodger and Jimmy Forster-Jones stood for a moment on the parapet in the sunshine. The Bodger’s eye was caught, as it had been so many times in the past, by the view from the College, looking out over the river Dart, the town and harbour, out to the far blue sea.

‘Lord,’ he said, admiringly, ‘you can see just why they put the College here. It’s an absolutely marvellous place for it. Hills, fields, woods, harbour, boats, river, headland, then the sea, it makes you actually want to get out there. Must be something to do with the perspective. Everything so clear close by, so hazy and mysterious out there. When I was here before, it never failed me. Whenever I was feeling a bit down, or fed up, or getting the feeling that it wasn’t worth it, all I had to do was look out there, and I could see what it was all about, what the end result was going to be. Think of all the blokes who’ve gone out of this harbour. They served all over the world. A hell of a lot of them died. They all started here.’

Jimmy had been listening to The Bodger with mounting consternation. ‘I say, Bodger, do watch it. There’s not a dry eye in the house. You’re going to have to be careful about this romantic touch. It doesn’t suit the young men of today, you know. They’re looking for a steady administrative job with an index-linked pension when they retire. Sea-borne bank managers, that’s what they are, and not so sea-borne, either. Anyway, all I know about this harbour is that a bloody cold wind comes whipping up it in the winter, I can tell you.’

The College, as always, looked as though it was posing for a picture postcard photograph, but beneath that scenic serenity The Bodger found the old fevers still raging. Under the surface, Dartmouth was always in a frantic state of tension compounded by competition and contest. There was no way to stop people competing against each other at Dartmouth - indeed competition was in the air they breathed, injected into their syllabus, encouraged by words, deeds and example. Wherever two or more officers under training were gathered together, they at once divided into divisions and began to play, run, swim, jump, climb, pull or sail against each other. Their competitive spirits were stoked to ever higher degree by their own desire to do well at the College in the face of an uncertain future, and by their divisional officers’ own professional ambitions and the vicarious successes they derived from their divisions’ feats.

Everywhere The Bodger went, he saw signs of this manic urge to compete, so that afterwards he wondered whether his tour of that day had not all been part of some frantic dream. It was not just the activity on the playing fields, and in the gymnasium and on the river. The College birds sang as though against the stop-watch. The College grasshoppers whirred as though Pounter’s eye was upon them. The College horses looked fit enough to jump out of their skins, and even the Britannia beagles, though it was summer, looked trained to the inch. The motor-mower driver on the golf course, The Bodger saw, was wearing huge leather gauntlets, goggles, and a large round bright red crash helmet. As The Bodger passed, the mower came round one comer of the fairway almost on two rollers. The driver swayed outwards as he steered his machine madly off in another direction, with a grinding clashing of gears and a rising roar from the engine.

‘What’s he up to?’

The mower skidded sideways on to another green. The driver was hunched grimly over the steering handles.

‘He’s trying to mow the whole course in two hours, twenty minutes.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Because the present record is two and a half hours.’

In the wardroom galley, the staff of cooks were opening cans of soup like men demented, their heads nodding together rhythmically, their hands a blur of rapid movement. Empty cans were rattling like spent cartridge-cases in a pile in a large bin. The number ‘29’ was chalked on a board beside the door. The chief cook was adding chalk marks to a row, one every few seconds. Jimmy exchanged a knowing nod with him.

‘That’s ‘how many cans six men managed to open in a minute yesterday,’ he told The Bodger. ‘They’re trying to go one better today.’

Outside the wardroom, The Bodger paused to look at an ornamental column, which stood as tall as man’s eye, with a dramatic arrangement of various flowers, leaves, grasses and creepers sprouting or hanging from it. Somebody had clearly been to a deal of trouble. Jimmy took out a card which had been hidden somewhere under the jungle of foliage. He showed The Bodger the number written on it, ‘42’.

‘That’s the number of different kinds of flower or plant used in the decoration,’ he explained. ‘The record is seventy-four, held by the wife of the last College padre but one. The other wives were convinced she was a witch, and grew henbane in her backyard at the full moon and all that.’

The Bodger stared again at the decorated pillar, aghast at the amount of toil and ambition and frustration it represented.

‘The College has these crazes occasionally,’ Jimmy was saying. ‘I expect they had them when you were last here. You’re never quite sure what form they’re going to take. Last term, it was bog paper. All the officers under training competed to see how much they could use. At a sitting, so to speak. Our College consumption went up by several thousand thousand per cent. We’re still getting hurt and baffled letters from Naval Stores about it. Apparently they’re going to have to grow a special forest up in Saskatchewan somewhere, just to keep up with the BRNC’s consumption of loo paper.’

They were walking along the corridor of the main building, when The Bodger heard a shriek of ‘Mind yer backs, please sir!’ behind him. He stood aside, just in time, as an electric floor-polishing machine hurtled past him, its motor wailing mournfully. An aged naval pensioner, in blue uniform and brass buttons, was running behind it, or rather being dragged along by it, with his white locks flying, his rheumy eye staring, and the sweat standing out on his venerable brow. He looked like the Ancient Mariner hijacked by a runaway speed-boat.

The Bodger had quite forgotten the Dartmouth corridors. They were very wide, and very shiny, and very long. They seemed to go on for ever, taking different levels on different floors, as though on different planes of existence, and their wooden decks were polished most mornings by flying squadrons of pensioners with polishers such as the one which had nearly run them down. The Bodger stared down the long, long, corridor in front of him. Running figures suddenly crossed it, at the far end. The sound of many clattering footsteps echoed back towards him. These corridors were a part of The Bodger’s own boyhood. At thirteen he had had to double along them many times a day, with the fear of being late for a parade, or a class, or a game, or a muster, for ever treading like a fiend on his heels.

The corridor bulkheads were almost entirely lined with photographs, the great majority of them the term photographs of Dartmouth cadets, dating back many years. There they were, all of them the Navy of the future in their own day and generation, standing in rows on the College steps, their young faces screwed up against the sun or braced against the winter wind above their stiff collars and white lanyards. In front were their instructors and divisional officers and chief petty officers, with the current Captain of the College invariably sitting in the centre. The pictures were all framed and glassed and captioned, with everyone’s name there. Taken together, they were in their own way a priceless record of twentieth-century naval history.

The Bodger knew his own term of old and stopped in front of their photograph. He picked himself out at once, grinning, towards the right-hand end of the third row. There was old Corky, their term officer. Oddly enough, he had never risen above the rank of lieutenant commander he had had in the picture. Something must have gone badly wrong, for The Bodger remembered Corky with respect and affection and gratitude for all the advice he had given and the trouble he had taken with his cadets. Beside The Bodger was Dickie Vanbrugh, killed in a Liberator crash at Tripoli in 1943. On the other side was a boy called Fenton. The Bodger could remember no more about him than that he had killed himself in a motor cycle accident while they were doing their sub-lieutenant’s course at Greenwich. Further along was Eric. The Bodger could not for the moment recall his surname and looked at the tally below. Eric Glossop. He had been invalided from the Service after crushing his hand in a fall-block whilst hoisting a sea-boat.

The Bodger looked over the faces, pleased and gratified to see how many he could still put a name to. It was sometimes fashionable to claim that one could see in these young faces a reflection of their hopes and determination for the future. Not so, in The Bodger’s opinion; as he remembered it, they had all been waiting to go for lunch. Although, there were now no survivors from those of his term who had joined the Fleet Air Arm, he was still mildly surprised to see how few had otherwise come to a premature death, and how few had ever achieved any startling destiny. Those still serving were, of course, now very much in the minority. The rest had just served, and then gone. It was not the brightest, or the most memorable, or the gayest, or the wittiest, or even the most professionally competent, who had risen in the Service. The best of all in their term, in The Bodger’s opinion, had retired early to become a probation officer. Those who were still there were those, like The Bodger himself, with a talent for survival and perhaps, he thought, they were the best for the Navy in the end. The Navy did not really want clever, or witty, or talented, or even competent men. In the last resort, the Navy just wanted those who were willing to go on with it, come what may.