Good Enough For Nelson (7 page)

‘Oh no, not at all, sir!’ Isaiah Nine Smith looked genuinely shocked. ‘Not at all! In fact, quite the very opposite, sir. Some of them are sent to Dartmouth as
rewards
, for having done so well in their own training set-ups back home. Only the very best come. But, as I said, they may have done well at home, but in some cases, not all by any means, their English hasn’t quite kept up. And we do have to make allowances. We sometimes run a small special course. The Prof. normally takes them himself.’

The Bodger mentally stored the information, as one more example of the Prof.’s services to the College.

‘But to get back to what I was saying, sir...’ Isaiah Nine Smith had the conversational tenacity of the good committee man. ‘We can assume they can read and write and speak English, but that’s all. Nothing else. We get all types, all classes, all political and religious views, we’re constantly amazed at what the midshipmen nowadays know and what they don’t know. You get the occasional one who has never used a napkin and drinks his finger bowl and eats his peas off his knife ...’

‘Have you ever actually done that?’

‘No, sir, to be honest, I can’t say I’ve ever tried.’

‘According to Mr Spicer, it’s bloody difficult.’

‘He should know, sir. But as I was saying, sir, one winter term you might find that nobody can play rugger. None of them ever heard of it. Yet the next summer, by sod’s law, you get half the London Scottish team. We also get lads who have run their father’s undertakers business for the last two years, or played three seasons in professional rep. as a spear-carrier, or someone who’s conducted guided tours to Katmandu. The old cannabis trail, he called it. You never know. We’ve got a bloke now who’s made his own hovercraft, speaks three languages and spends part of his leave working in a remedial home for handicapped children.’

‘Hell’s teeth, that sounds too good to be true. Who’s that?’

‘Chap called McAllester, sir.’

‘Ah.’ The Bodger now knew, from experience, that McAllester was bound to rise in the Navy. The main difficulty in the Service had always been that of getting oneself known, without actually getting one’s name in the papers. Here was a young man who had come twice to the Captain of the College’s attention before the Captain had been in the College half a dogwatch. Both occasions had been unschemed and unplanned. Luck was an essential quality for a successful naval officer, as The Bodger knew better than anybody.

‘The thing is, we get such a wide selection now, sir. The ordinary common-or-garden hewer of wood and drawer of water, your ordinary actual Dartmouth bloke, who used to join at thirteen in short trousers in your day and in long trousers at eighteen with me, he’s a very rare fish indeed now, sir. Very much in the minority. If you look at the composition of the divisions, you will see that besides the Gromboolians...’

‘What percentage are they, exactly?’

‘I don’t know precisely, sir. I could work it out, but offhand, and
fairly
accurately, I would say about one in ten.’

‘As much as that?’

‘Good God, sir, if the Gromboolian navies had their way it would be a hundred per cent! They love it. Lap it up. They queue up to send their bods here. But, of course, if you allowed the percentage to creep up above a certain figure then the very Dartmouth atmosphere they want and are paying for would disappear. Like a place that was all tourists and nobody living there, the very people that the tourists have paid to see. We’re training some of these officers to man ships we can’t afford ourselves now and operate gear we designed but haven’t the money to put in our own ships. I think it’s happening all over the Navy now, sir. In a way we’re now like somebody who has had to sell his own estate and can’t afford to keep up his own shoot, but goes on designing guns and training keepers and gun-dogs for other people who can still afford to shoot.’

The Bodger was beginning to admire Isaiah Nine Smith’s fluency. This, he recognised, was a vital man. Ikey could be The Bodger’s hot line into the College’s moods.

‘But as I was saying, sir...’ Once again Isaiah Nine Smith came remorselessly back to his point. ‘If you look at any collection of OUTs out there, you’ll see the Gromboolians, but not only them, but padres and Royal Marines and upperyard men, or royal yard men as they call them now, supplementary list officers and schoolies and doctors and aircrew officers and failed aircrew officers who are trying to requalify for something else. We take everybody on now, sir, like Eskimo Nell. Then there are blokes who are just about to go to university and blokes who’ve just been to university, and blokes who are at university, coming here to do their training in their vacations. We already have the nursing officers doing their training and I’ve no doubt we shall all wake up one morning and find the place moving with Wrens. I think it is rather splendid that everybody,
everybody
, should come to the same place to do their first basic training. All get their first encounter with the Navy at the same place and in the same way. But frankly, I think we have just about reached the limits of variety. We must be operating now just about at our limits.’

That phrase ‘at our limits’ occurred again and again, as The Bodger went round the College. Everybody warmly and sincerely assured him they were now operating at their limits.

‘Of course, we’re operating just about at our limits here, sir,’ said the College helicopter flight commander, a very short, very tubby lieutenant commander with a bright red beard who, for some reason, was always called Buster. ‘Everybody has to take a two-day helo winching acquaint course and frankly, we’re pushed to get ‘em all in.’

The Bodger had been watching a class, dressed in flying overalls and helmets, practising being winched up and down from a hovering helicopter. Each member of the class in turn stood underneath while the helicopter lowered a strop, like a giant padded hangman’s noose, down to him. He put the strop over his shoulders and under his armpits and then stood to attention. The wire tautened and drew him upwards towards the open helicopter doorway. After being hauled up just far enough to be able to swing and smash the bridge of his nose against the lower door sill coaming, each man was then rapidly lowered to earth again. With the roaring of the helicopter engine, the mighty rushing of winds from its rotors, and the mental associations of rescue and disaster when seeing a man dangling upon the strop, it was as exciting as watching the fire brigade at work.

‘Just about at our limits, sir,’ said Buster again. ‘But of course, it is much better that they all do helo winching for the first time out here on a nice sunny day at Dartmouth than on the casing of a submarine, say, in the dark, freezing cold, and blowing a gale somewhere north of the Arctic circle.’ Buster’s voice, expressions and gestures vividly pantomimed just how dark, freezing and generally uncomfortable and hazardous that experience was likely to be.

‘Must be,’ said The Bodger.

’Of course,’ said the College Bosun, who remembered The Bodger from his last time at the College, ‘we’re working right up to our limits here, you know, Bodger. The rate they bash the boats up, we’re pushed to get enough out on the river every day.’

At the pontoon at Sandquay, boats were arriving and leaving with feverish speed, as though a film of a peaceful day out on the river had been speeded up several times. The tooting of whistles, the figures of the boats’ crews, the washing of the water, once again took The Bodger back to his own days as a cadet. The river was still, as ever, the most evocative part of Dartmouth. Occasionally, after the thudding and rubbing sounds of a boat coming alongside, there was a sharper, louder clunking as one boat met another. Voices were then raised. Hot words were exchanged, and hard words. Phrases such as ‘rule of the road’ and ‘port to port’ and ‘you clumsy bugger’ came floating across the busy waters.

As The Bodger watched, he noticed a slackening of the tempo of river life. The water seemed to be emptying of boats. The sailing dinghies were being drawn up on the floating pontoon. The motor-cutters were being secured alongside the main jetty, and their crews were taking off their life-jackets. A large yacht secured to a buoy out in the stream was being abandoned by her crew, who were rowing themselves ashore in a rubber dinghy.

‘What’s happening, Bo?’

‘You might well ask, Bodger. They’re all going to play cricket, would you believe? Somebody somewhere up there,’ the Bosun raised his eyes disgustedly to the sky, ‘has decreed that they’re all going to play cricket this afternoon. We’ve got a hundred bods ready to take their proficiency tests, and they’re always crying out for them to take them and just as you’ve got things going nicely, you can bet your old boots, whango whango, up the hill everybody, play cricket. I’m told they’re even getting people out of the sickbay,’ the Bosun added bitterly. ‘Giving ‘em pain-killing drugs and all, to keep ‘em on their feet while they play cricket.’

The Bodger did not actually see anyone up on the playing fields under the influence of pain-killing drugs, but almost everybody else in the College was there. The Nine Cricket Games, as they came to be called, were the sort of concerted mass activity which the College always did well. It was team endeavour, translated on to a massive, almost a Homeric, scale. So many games of cricket had probably never been held simultaneously in the college before, but the problems had been overcome. The challenges had been surmounted, gear had been obtained, extra pitches marked out, and the games had all begun. Everywhere The Bodger looked, there was a game of cricket. The main pitches were all occupied and subsidiary ones had been created beside them. Some fielders were so close together and so uncertain of the rules that they were not sure which game they were actually playing in. Not all the pitches had proper stumps and not all the stumps proper bails. Not all the wicket-keepers had proper gloves, and some had improvised with leather gloves, fives gloves or woolly mittens of their own.

The word had gone round and the games were being watched by a vast crowd, in carnival mood. Some of the College wives were there, wearing straw hats and summer dresses, and pushing children in push-carts. Older children eddied to and fro, in and out of the fringes of the nearest game.

The divisional officers were also out in strength. One of them, Charlie Charleshaughton, also a gunnery officer, and in charge of the Jellicoe Division, strode round the field, singling out individual Jellicoes for his own brand of encouragement. ‘Bags of go, Jellicoe!’ he barked, wherever he recognised one of his flock. ‘Bags of go, Jellicoe!’ came the phrase, rising and falling, fading and strengthening, louder and softer, with a sort of divisional doppler effect, as Charlie Charleshaughton tacked around the field.

The Gromboolians were in general delighted to be invited to play cricket. Some of them already played at home, and all of them considered it an essential part of coming to England, like watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. For those who did not know the laws of the game, John Jemingham explained.

John Jerningham, known as the Hon. John, was as near to the immaculate conception of what a very parfait naval officer should be as any naval officer ever could be. His linen was always perfectly clean, his tie always tied with an extra large and shiny knot, his uniforms always cut and worn with a flair that nobody else could ever quite match. The Bodger had served with him in the old
Superb
and knew that under the affectation of indolence, the Hon. John was a very able man.

‘Cricket is a very subtle game.’ the Hon. John was saying to an audience, mostly of Gromboolians. ‘It is probably the most subtle game in the world. But the rules are very simple. There are two sides, the batting side who are ‘in’, as it is termed, and the fielding side who are not in, but out, out, that is to say, on the field. Each side has one innings each, in some matches, two innings. To start an innings, the fielding side go out first, and then two batsmen from the side who are in go out, out on the field that is. Those two batsmen are in until the fielding side get one of them out in which case he comes in and another batsman goes out and he is in until they get him out. As each batsman is out he comes in and another one goes out until ten batsmen are out. The whole side are then out, and everybody comes in, including the eleventh batsman who is not out. However, although he is not out, he still comes in with everybody else. Now they have got the batting side out, the fielding side go in, while the side who were batting, having come in after being all out, go out to field. Once again, two batsmen from the side who are in go out and are in until they are out and come in again. So it goes on, until that side too are all out, and then everybody comes in again, and the match is over. Any questions? No? Well, now you all know the rules, you can all push off and play.’

The Bodger intercepted Bungey One as he darted by with a piece of paper.

‘Congratulations. How did you manage to organise it? Did you split them up into those who had played before and those who hadn’t?’

‘Good Lord, no, sir, there wasn’t time for that. I got an alphabetical list of all the Officers Under Training and chopped them off, every eleven names.’ Bungey One looked down at his list. ‘So this game here, sir, nearest you, has Aaron, Abdulabia, Acland, Adrianovitch, Anson, and so on. That far one, right up there, beyond the pavilion, is where Wilson, Yashif, Young and Ziegler are playing, sir.’

‘Well done indeed.’

‘Yes sir, it’s simpler if you work to a system. The top name on the list of eleven is the captain of the side, and the second one is the wicketkeeper. Numbers three and four are the opening batsmen, numbers ten and eleven on the list are the opening bowlers. Everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing, that way, sir.’

‘I see.’

The Bodger and Jimmy began to walk round the field, their progress marked by every eye. The fielders fielded more assiduously, the bowlers bowled more strenuously, and the batsmen batted more stoutly, wherever they chanced to look. And if a fielder stopped a ball, or a bowler got a wicket, or a batsman chanced to score a run while The Bodger was watching, he was envied by everybody in the game. Even the newest comer to Dartmouth knew that the surest and quickest way to commendation was by some startling feat on the games field.