Scruffy - A Diversion (12 page)

The apelet was on her stomach and was being held down by Tim while Felicity cleansed the wound and prepared to apply an antiseptic. The monkey had managed to twist its head about and was regarding Felicity with some anxiety, but also with trust and love.

“It’s going to sting for just a minute,” Felicity said to the apelet as though she were addressing a child, “but after that it’s going to be all better.” With firm, practised fingers she washed away the dried, coagulated blood. Juliette squirmed.

“Hold still, you little devil, will you,” said Tim. “Stop making things more difficult. We’re only doing this for your own good.” He bent over and peered into the wound now exposed. “H’m, nasty!”

Felicity swabbed it dry once more and poured the antiseptic on a bit of gauze. “If they’d only listen to you about the cages,” she said, “these things wouldn’t happen. Poor little darling.”

“Or at least supply us with a proper vet. That cut could do with a stitch or two.”

“One isn’t supposed to mind having a scar
there
” Felicity observed. “She’ll have one too. Now then.” She applied the gauze. Juliette screamed like a child, then squirmed and whimpered.

Tim said, soothingly, “Come on, old girl, it isn’t all that bad,” and then to Felicity, “Isn’t it awful to have to hurt them?”

They smiled at one another across the table and Felicity said, “What a good, kind man you are, Tim.”

The Captain flew into a perfect panic of embarrassment. “Nonsense,” he replied, “absolute rotter.”

“Tim!”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Felicity began. Juliette took up her attention for another instant, “Oh, do hold her still for another second, can you?” and then, “I’ve been thinking we could get married after I come back. Mother will fuss dreadfully of course.”

“Will she?” said Tim in a voice of a man whose mind is elsewhere, but who nevertheless has heard the question. “I don’t suppose there’s any use trying to keep a bandage on her, particularly on her rear. She’d have it off in a second. We’ll just have to keep catching her and cleaning it until it’s healed. Oh Lord! Your mother, you mean!” He shouted suddenly as the full import of Felicity’s last remark penetrated, and then—“What do you mean when you come back?”

“I’m going to volunteer for the Wrens. I’m going to learn coding and signalling and be made an officer with privileges and use Daddy’s name and be sent back here. Then I thought—”

Tim was suddenly looking at her with a curious fierceness. “You are not to come back, Felicity. I don’t want you to.”

“Are you being unkind, Tim?”

“Huh! Unkind! After what I told you about those German guns. They’ve sprouted a new lot, a regular plantation. I don’t want you dismembered.” His gaze was now direct and revealing. “I want you membered.”

“And you?” queried Felicity.

“I’m in the business,” Tim replied briefly. “I shall get under a table.”

“Oh, Tim,” Felicity wailed, “why couldn’t you have been a Swiss clock-maker?” She took a tube of soothing antibiotic salve and squeezed some into the wound. Juliette squeaked and they began to laugh. They both suddenly felt themselves singularly happy. Felicity murmured, “Juliette, Juliette, wherefore art thou Juliette. Oh dear, that isn’t right, is it?”

Tim asked, “Would she really kick up a row?”

“Oh yes. And Daddy will too.”

Tim reflected, “I imagine he will . . . I would. All done? I can’t hold her much longer.”

Felicity replied, “Sissy!” and wiped the edges of the wound clear. Then she said, “Tim, would you rather not marry me?”

Captain Bailey cried, “Oh, my God, Felicity!” and in the exclamation managed to express such an abysmal horror at the thought of not marrying her that he conveyed all that she needed to know.

“I oughtn’t to be gone more than six months,” Felicity said, “seven at the most, but as soon as I have my commission—”

Tim said, “Look here, Felicity, I haven’t got a bean, you know.”

“Neither have I. No expectations either. Not a single rich relative. And I shall enjoy being a burden to you.”

“Life on a Captain’s pay—”

“Bliss!” then Felicity blinked her eyes clear of two large tears which somehow had suddenly formed there and added, “You don’t mind that I’m too fat? And not very pretty? I can cook. I mean really, not play cooking.”

“Felicity!” Tim cried once more in a perfect agony of frustration. And once more he packed into her name whole pages of unspoken emotional literature, and then somehow found some words, “How the devil can a man hang on to a confounded wounded she-ape and at the same time tell someone what he feels—the magnitude of it—the awesomeness of it all—I mean how it makes you think you don’t know whether you’re going to burst into tears or laugh or fall down in a dead faint. It sort of tears you to pieces inside and makes you all giddy and sick and at the same time you want to yell at the top of your lungs.”

“Oh, Tim,” Felicity said, “you make love so beautifully. You can let her go now.”

Tim did so and reached for Felicity, but Juliette was quicker than he. In a flash the little apelet was up from the table, had leaped on to Felicity’s bosom and wrapped both her arms about her neck. She turned her wizened face towards Tim, bared her small fangs and scolded and chittered at him angrily.

Felicity held her close and murmured, “Hush little one, you mustn’t be jealous. He loves me.” She put her chin down upon the little head and looked across the table at Tim and on her face was an expression of tenderness which pierced the man and left him shaking with the love that he was experiencing for this odd, kind and rather wonderful girl. “There’s all the rest of the time for us,” she said, and then added, “Dear Tim.”

Ten days later Felicity sailed for England to volunteer for the Wrens. Because of the war there was no formal announcement of engagement. She and Tim parted with the understanding that when she returned with her commission they would be married.

It was not six months, however, but a whole year and five months before Felicity was able to return to the Rock wearing the stripes of a Wren 2nd Officer. The delay in her return had been occasioned by her being just that much too good and too intelligent. She had made 3rd Officer so easily and so far at the top of her class that she had been retained to train the new cadres joining up and it was not until she had been promoted to the more exalted position of 2nd Officer and applied almost unbearable pressure on her already harassed father that she was assigned to Gibraltar in charge of all Naval signals and coding there.

And when she did finally return it was to find Tim in disgrace, dismissed from his job as O.I.C. Apes, his morale practically non-existent and the morale of all on the Rock not much better.

8
Background to a Sacking

T
he unpleasant consequences of war fall variously upon different communities as well as individuals in accordance with the situations and problems of those communities and individuals. Wars are always seen as through the wrong end of a telescope so that they diminish to what each person can see affecting his life and himself.

For Captain Bailey the conflict had narrowed down to his apes, his guns and an occasional letter from Felicity. These last were cheerful, straightforward efforts containing a wealth of detail concerning life in the W.R.N.S. at the beginning of the war, and a paucity of sentimentality. Felicity had a theory that men didn’t like soppy stuff.

In this she might have been wrong. In Tim’s case absence was making the heart grow not only fonder but increasingly nervous. A girl like Felicity loose amongst the Navy in Great Britain could be cutting a swath. Sooner or later she would encounter a Naval type who would attract her and who would not be carrying an anchor chain of parental disapproval about his neck. He thought her letters progressively cooler and since he had the shyness of the British and didn’t wish to press, he tempered his to hers.

Therefore he concentrated on his guns and his monkeys. The former as far as Captain Bailey was concerned were money for jam. He was a dedicated Artilleryman who up to that time had never fired at anything but a target, but who had been passionately devoted to seeing that whatever he threw at that target, and from whatever distance, landed smack in the centre of it. This kind of keenness soon communicated itself to his teams of gun crews; perfection became a game and success a habit. The same attitude, however, was less successful when it came to carrying on in wartime his job as O.I.C. Apes.

To begin with there had always been something faintly ludicrous in not only the official title but also in the job itself. With the declaration of war when soldiers’ jaws were supposed to set in hard, grim lines, it became absurd and not even the fact that when the souls on the Rock were counted and numbered, the apes were treated as humans and furnished with both identity and ration cards, made it any less so. In fact if anything it was even more comic. Lovejoy kept the cards in a small file box up in St. Michael’s hut close to the apes’ village. The Gunner was rather proud of them, and pleased. There had been moments when both he and Tim feared that with the onset of the war the apes might have been ordered destroyed.

There was also a paradox involved; with the war the necessity of drilling crews for the anti-aircraft guns and the long-range batteries pointing out to sea became paramount, the infantry had to be rehearsed and the engineers began blowing, blasting, drilling and exploding so that between all of the Services, from morning until night, something was banging, cracking, booming, chaffering, rattling and crashing on the Rock. The apes, who hated noises of any kind, were in a constant state of nervousness often bordering upon panic.

Tim soon discovered when he went into long-range planning for his apes that while they had been rationed and identified as humans it was merely to avoid double book-keeping and if his attempts for his charges had met with little sympathy before the war, they now encountered downright hostility.

This came to a head one morning after the fall of France when the Brigadier looked over to his Brigade Major, newly promoted from Captain, Quennel who had the schedule, and asked, “Who’s next?”

“Captain Bailey, sir,” Quennel replied.

“Bailey?”

“He’s been bothering me to give him some time for weeks, sir. I knew that you didn’t— Well, I put him down for five minutes.”

The alarm bell within the Brigadier rang. “Bailey,” he said, “you mean that damn monkey fellow? Look here, Quennel, I haven’t—”

“He also has the best gun crews on the Rock, sir. They are at the top again.”

“Oh! Very well. I’ll see him.”

When Tim came in looking smart and respectful as an officer should, the Brigadier was inclined to let him have the benefit of the doubt and gave him a civil good morning. But he also glanced at the clock on his desk and said: “Major Quennel has allotted you five minutes which we will say begins as of now. I suggest you state what you wish to see me about.”

“The apes, sir,” said Tim without hesitation.

Brigadier Gaskell sat quietly and made no reply.

“There have been no provisions at all made for them,” Tim continued, encouraged by the silence. “Everything and everyone else has been covered either by regulation, plan, or executive order for all contingencies and emergencies, except them, sir.”

The Brigadier maintained his silence, but he picked up a paper-knife and played with it.

“I know they’ve been given identity cards and ration books,” Tim went on, “but I’ll get to that in a moment. It isn’t that the ration is insufficient, only that it is the wrong kind. They haven’t been getting what they need and what they’re used to. Lovejoy says you can see their condition is going off already. You can tell by their coats, sir, and they get coughs and things more quickly.”

The Brigadier continued to say nothing, but his eyes strayed to the clock.

“But it is really about the concrete shelters that I have come, and the steel for the cages. I have drawn up the plans, but I won’t bother you with them now. There’s the target practice, which they can’t stand—their ear-drums, sir, they’re not like ours—and of course there will be bombs sooner or later and if the Germans—I mean the Spanish—well, we all know, sir, it could get very sticky, and where would they go? If they were driven away from their usual haunts by bombardment, they’d starve to death in a week. They might even desert the Rock altogether and get over to the mainland.”

The Brigadier now withdrew his eyes from the clock and fastened them upon Captain Bailey, and allowed the unspoken thought, “Would that be bad?” to be plainly registered upon his countenance.

“Well, sir,” Tim resumed, “if the apes
did
leave the Rock or were all killed off and it got around amongst the men—well, you know how they are, sir, about legends and superstitions and things, and just at the time when you’d most want them to stand fast they’d be thinking about the apes deserting or dying out . . .”

The look of interest that had settled upon the Brigadier’s face at the thought that the apes might be wiped out or disappear for good was now replaced by one of distaste and cold annoyance.

“The way I have worked it out,” Tim explained, suddenly anxious that time was running out, “is that with a couple of hundred cubic feet of concrete and half a ton of steel wire I could manage shelters that would not only be bomb-proof but practically sound-proof as well; I have got the place picked out off Ferdinand’s Battery. We’d go into the hill a way, the cages would be to protect the females and their young after breeding—”

Time
was
running out and he rattled on with his plan and his needs somewhat in a panic for fear he would not get it all said or his point sufficiently emphasized.

Gaskell finally did hold up his hand. “Your time is up, Captain Bailey,” he said.

To his surprise the Brigadier found himself remarkably controlled, possibly because of the fact that in view of his own needs and problems, the demands of this young idiot were so utterly improbable and ridiculous, not to mention impossible.