by Simon Raven
‘Thank you, sir. But what exactly is my punishment?’
‘You’ll find out,’ the Uncle said.
The Uncle was a rotund and beautiful old gentleman with a deep, succulent laugh, like Falstaff ’s. While he openly proclaimed his supreme and unswerving faith to be placed in the ‘Three Cs’ (Classics, Cricket and Christianity), he also had a passion for English Literature (especially poetry) and the plastic arts. He sung a pretty bass, played a fair game of Fives, knew trees and flowers. He was always ready (like Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair) ‘to crack a jest’ with you even as you stood in the dock awaiting his sentence; but normally his jokes were in better taste than Sir Pitt’s and were accompanied by a long and generous belly-rumble of laughter, of the kind with which he had warmed our hearts and bodies through the sad and undernourished winters of the War. It was this – or rather the absence of this – which worried me now. The laugh which he had given just before dismissing me had been untypical: it had not been leisurely and amiable; it had been brusque, and it had been at my expense…not indeed spiteful, for the Uncle was wholly without spite, but – well – retributive. The Uncle had smelt something coming, something which he didn’t altogether care for but was going to serve me right…and so amply was it going to do so that he could even afford a little pity, to express a genuine wish that I would enjoy myself (‘Good luck in tomorrow’s match’) before the Furies arrived with the reckoning.
When the Furies appeared, a few weeks later, they were not immediately recognisable by me, first because there were only two of them, and secondly because both were much preoccupied with making jokes. (I should have known better, even then, than to be deceived by that.)
They were called C M (or Maurice) Bowra, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and A B Ramsay (‘the Ram’), Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge; and they had arrived to conduct the Annual Examination of the Classical Sixth. If there was a Fury about the place, I should have said, it must surely be Hugh Trevor Roper, a conceited, angular and predatory young man, still in uniform, who had come to examine the historians. But History and Trevor Roper were nothing to me: I was to answer to witty Bowra and the gently prattling Ram…both of whom would surely take kindly to a clever, amusing, successful, handsome boy like me.
At first all seemed to be going well. In so far as the two examiners were out for anybody’s blood they seemed to be out for each other’s: Bowra, who considered the Ram to be soggy and sanctimonious, excoriated him with oral scalpels; while the Ram, bleeding cruelly on the sacrificial table, yet contrived, with his piteous bleats, to raise interesting doubts as to the purity of Bowra’s scholarship, the soundness of his College administration, and the orthodoxy of his moral character. Lulled by the strophe and antistrophe (reported to me with relish by Sniffy Russell) of these recriminations, I deluded myself into thinking that my papers had been rather well done (despite total lack of preparation) and were in any case quite good enough to satisfy two old mountebanks, to whom I had made myself particularly charming and in front of whom I had made 50-odd in dashing style for the Scholars versus the Rest of the School – surely so signal a service to Scholarship as to render mere examinations irrelevant and to procure me, of itself, a brilliant place in the List.
Disillusion was swift and ugly. The Headmaster sent for me the day before the results were due to be announced. The two examiners had apparently enjoyed my company and my batting, deplored my early election to King’s, pitied and despised my presumptious efforts to pull the wool over their eyes, and brought me out precious near the bottom of the List – below several scholars of the year junior to my own.
‘Mr Irvine has suggested,’ the Headmaster said, ‘that it might save you embarrassment if I permitted you to absent yourself from Hall when the results are read out before the School tomorrow.’
Good old Uncle: extending what charitable unguent he could to mitigate my long foreseen (by him) and most just chastisement. But one had one’s pride.
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much, but I’ll come and face it out.’
And so I did, sitting in the front row, while the Ram looked down at me from the platform with unctuous disdain and Maurice Bowra glinted at me with a combination of malice and amusement, as if to say, ‘Oh yes, you’re a cute little cookie all right, and don’t think I haven’t got your number.’
Later on the Uncle greeted me with one of his friendliest smiles.
‘Of course you’ll do much better again next Quarter,’ he said; ‘but it’s always a worthwhile experience to be tried and found wanting by dons of such distinction.’
Dons of such distinction… Well, Amen. But I often wondered, as time went on, what the Uncle or the Headmaster, or even the rather more sophisticated Sniffy Russell, would have said if they’d been told the tale which Malcolm Bullock (of whom more hereafter) told me some years later: how Maurice Bowra, bent on pleasure one dark night, discovered at daybreak that he had mistaken a tin of black boot polish for the more appropriate sanitary colloid.
V
RED BERET
After I was sacked from Charterhouse in the autumn of 1945, I volunteered for the Army. King’s had made it plain to Robert Birley, to his pleasure as my friend and to his deep discontent as a Christian moralist, that they considered my offence (‘the usual thing’) to be entirely trivial and that they would certainly not withdraw my Scholarship; but they also made it plain that what with the end of the War and the sudden rush of ex-servicemen they had no time or space just yet for me. So the Army it had to be (a very good job, too, as discipline and discomfort were exactly what I most needed), and I duly applied for and was accepted by the Parachute Regiment, which I joined, after Primary Training, in the early Spring of 1946.
Now the War was over, the Parachute Regiment was changing its style. No longer was it a shower of hard-bitten and scruffy ex-convicts descending from the sky armed with flick knives and primed with every dirty device known from Bow to Dartmoor; it was becoming a Corps of clean-limbed aspirants to honour, who were drilled and turned out to the standards of the Royal Marines, were disciplined with a formality which at times surpassed that of the Household Brigade, were imbued with the traditional concepts of loyalty and valour, and (almost incidentally) had the phlegm to step out of an aeroplane into nothing relying only on their by no means infallible parachutes. Gone now were the slouching razor boys, the bandy Sergeants who had been booth-boxers, the evil smelling, rum-swilling Lance-Corporals who had turned the Company Stores into a fence or a brothel, and the ex-ranker Officers selected for their foul mouths and biceps. Now we were to be a corps d’élite, nothing less. NCOs and Warrant Officers were transferred to us from the Brigade of Guards, brilliant young Officers were poached from every Regiment of the Line, while those of Field Rank were lean men, hungry and alert. Hail to the new King Hal: and away forever with Bardolph and Pistol.
But of course Bardolph and Pistol (to say nothing of Falstaff) are hardy perennials who do not go away easily. For one thing, they are adept at camouflaging themselves, or appearing to have turned over a new leaf, or at making sycophantic or such other noises as changing times may require. So despite the New Chivalry which appeared to dominate No. 1 ITC (Infantry Training Centre) of the Parachute Regiment, despite the colossal presence of Regimental Sergeant-Major Lord of the Coldstream Guards, despite a Colonel who had been a county cricketer and Captains with glittering rosettes on honourably faded ribands, despite the panoply of England (one might say), Corporal Nym still lurked by the stove in the Stores and Pistol toyed with Mistress Quickly and Doll, forgetting or disdaining to use the ‘Early Treatment (Prophylactic) Packet’ which authority, being these days, even in the new model Parachute Regiment, more concerned with hygiene than with morals, benevolently provided for such excursions.
Corruption, in short, was still moving pretty near the surface, and with a nose as adept as that of a truffling pig I sniffed it out in the most unlikely quarter.
Captain Isaacs the Cricket Of
ficer, a moderate but knowledgeable player, had managed, by mid-June of 1946, to assemble a very passable XI. This placed him high in favour with the cricketing Colonel; there was even talk of an acting Majority. But to retain esteem Isaacs must retain his XI – which was about to be seriously depleted by the ‘Passing Out’ of my own intake. Three Recruits in this intake were important to Isaacs’ XI: his star spin-bowler, his left-handed opening batsman, and a useful all-rounder (Recruit Lance-Corporal Raven). Our departure for Parachute (Jumping) School was now imminent and with it the debilitation of Isaacs’ XI and the forfeiture of Isaacs’ putative Majority (of his Captaincy too, perhaps, as even this was only temporary).
In this emergency, Isaacs summoned the three of us to his office and proposed a deal. Or rather, he proposed the possibility of proposing a deal. The hint was that if we would consent to stay behind at the ITC and play cricket, Isaacs would make it well worth our while. He could not be more specific until he was assured of our good will.
My two companions, like the honest, fresh-faced Englishmen they were, said that much as they loved cricket they had joined the Parachute Regiment to parachute, and nothing would persuade them to forfeit or defer their posting to Parachute School. I said that keen as I was to do my parachute jumps (untrue), I nevertheless felt a certain loyalty to Isaacs and his XI after red Beret nearly two months of playing with them (untrue), and therefore found myself in a quandary (true, though not in the sense I implied, as my real difficulty lay in calculating whether the loss of face caused by evading my jumps would be adequately compensated by the quality of the cricket which Isaacs could offer (poorish) and the magnitude of the bribe which he might conjure – not, I suspected, of the first order).
I, at any rate, was prepared to listen. My two fellow-recruits saluted smartly and marched strongly forth, pure of mind and straight of limb, untainted and unbought. Captain Isaacs sighed with self-loathing as he watched them go. He knew they were right; he admired them for going and despised me for remaining; and he hated himself for treating with me. But I was now the last, the forlorn hope for Isaacs’ XI and his coveted brevet. I was a precious, even a rare, commodity, and must be handled with reverence.
‘Well, Raven?’ he began with affected cordiality.
‘Well, sir?’ said I.
He sighed again, bitter yet resigned, and began to outline his scheme for my retention.
After ‘Passing Out’, I was to be held on the strength of No. 1 Parachute Regiment ITC on the pretext that, as a recognised aspirant to a Commission, I would shortly be called before one of the preliminary and local boards in this connection; it was therefore desirable, the inquisitive or censorious could be told, that I should be ready to answer such a summons instanter and not have to be dragged back the length of England from a Jumping Course which would, furthermore, be invalidated (so tight was the schedule) if interrupted.
All this was plausible enough. But what, I now enquired, what – er – status would I enjoy? A polite hint that I must know without more ado what price was being offered. Isaacs narrowed his eyes, flared his nostrils, smiled and shuddered at the same time like the recipient of a traitor-kiss, sighed his twentieth sigh, and then laid it all on the line for me with admirable precision. My nominal employment, he said, would be as a Mail-Clerk in Headquarter Company Headquarters. I should now become a pukkah Lance-Corporal instead of a mere Recruit Lance-Corporal; I should have the barest minimum of work to do, being excused all duties after noon each day on the official supposition that I was playing cricket (even if I wasn’t); and I should enjoy the absolute and guaranteed good will of the HQ Company CSM, one Serjeant-Major Lewis, who would ensure that I was not subjected to intrusive chores such as Clerks’ Drill Parades or Evening PT. Finally, said Captain Isaacs with some self-satisfaction, he had arranged for me to enjoy a remarkable privilege, hitherto bestowed only on the Company Clerk, a certain Corporal Mond. Mond, Isaacs explained, was allowed to sleep and keep his gear in a private alcove of the Company Office, thus avoiding such annoyances as Reveille, Lights Out, Barrack Room Fatigues, Making Up Beds and Laying Out Kit for Inspection, and, in general, all the superveillance and interference which went with military life at low level. Captain Isaacs could now assure me that he had persuaded Mond to take me into his alcove, there being room, if only just, for another mattress: what a piece of work was this, crowed Isaacs, if he did say it himself. For Captain Isaacs, though displeased with what he was doing, was proud and pardonably proud of the package which he had contrived to get together. Those who ever served in the Army of the day and still remember its Tiberian discipline will appreciate his achievement. The last item alone, a bed in private quarters, was a luxury beyond the worth of rubies. No doubt about it: Isaacs was giving superb value. I clinched the deal on the spot, I ‘passed out’ with my companions two days later, and then, as they packed for Parachute School, I humped my kit down to Corporal Mond’s oasis of independence in HQ Company Office.
Although Captain Isaacs had already introduced me both to Mond and to CSM Lewis, I had barely taken either of them in, beyond noting that Mond was a pretty, dimpled redhead and that the Serjeant-Major was wasp-waisted and willowy. These brief impressions had led me to premise an affair between them and to infer that Mond’s privileged quarters had been allotted to him by the CSM in grateful exchange for his favours. I had hardly been in my new home for ten minutes when I began to realise how wrong I had been.
‘We’re here,’ said Corporal Mond gravely, ‘for Security. Guarding the Company Documents.’
‘Do they need guarding? I mean…who on earth would want them?’
‘That is just the sort of remark,’ said Mond, ‘which could get us turfed out tomorrow. You are, of course, quite right; nothing in this Office is of the slightest interest to anyone. But in order to get me installed in here, Serjeant-Major Lou has propagated the theory that a guard is needed for the confidential files, and somehow or other he has got people to believe it. The position, however, is delicate in the extreme. Any scepticism, however privately expressed, could start to radiate ethereal waves of doubt which might sooner or later reach the Company Commander. You must therefore make it an Absolute Article of Faith that we are the Guardians of Mighty Mysteries, and express that view on every possible occasion.’
‘Kind of the Serjeant-Major to take such trouble for you,’ I said, hinting.
‘Nothing to the trouble I take for him.’
Here it comes, I thought.
‘He has a termagent wife. He can’t fuck her. I do it for him every Thursday night…which keeps her more or less sweet for the rest of the week.’
‘Oh.’ I had a quick vision of this dainty boy in bed with a kind of Widow Twanky.
‘But six nights in seven I have to myself,’ said Mond, looking happily round the alcove, ‘a very fair proceeding, on the whole. I can get on with my work, you see.’
Mond was writing a book: a history of the Blitz on London. He had consented to my joining him because Captain Isaacs had represented to him that as a Scholar Elect of King’s College, Cambridge, I had literary tastes and skills that might assist his labour and edify his leisure. I did not demur, though I could have wished he was writing on a more sympathetic subject.
‘But all work and no joy,’ enunciated my new friend, ‘makes Mond a dull boy. One must have pleasure. Going to bed with Mrs Lou is like doing it with a sack of herringbones. Two nights of the remaining six are therefore dedicated to Aphrodite Polypous.’
‘Aphrodite what?’
‘Polypous. An epithet of my own invention. It means many-footed, hence many-legged. Many-legged Love, i.e. having it off with several girls at once.’
‘Very agreeable, I do see. But where do you get them all from?’
‘The NAAFI. They toss their knickers off like confetti. There’ll be plenty of legs for you too, if you want me to bring a few pairs along.’
‘Here?’
‘Here. Don’t worry. It’s all part of the deal with CSM Lou
.’
The weeks that followed were heady and exhausting. It turned out that Mond’s arrangements for the delivery of NAAFI delicacies to the Company Office were not quite as comprehensive as he had advertised them to be, but a delivery there positively was, of passably fresh and varied goods, and this quite regular. The average turnout for one of Mond’s soirées was one girl for each of us, and just as well perhaps, as there wasn’t really room for more in the alcove. Sometimes Mond would organise us into a rather ragged quadrilateral: sometimes he would decree performance by pairs and swap at half-time. On one notable occasion three girls turned up; but the third only wanted to watch, or so she said – and then caused considerable annoyance by masturbating glutinously with Mond’s best fountain pen, the one he kept for writing The London Blitz. On another occasion only one girl arrived, and I was quite interested and pleased by the attentions which Mond paid to myself on pretext of balancing the threesome.
The girls themselves were hot and good-humoured. True, some of them were unshapely and one or two of them unhygienic, but at that age (eighteen) I had appetite for all that came and more – ‘more’ in fact taking the form of Mond, generally at the end of the evenings spent working on his book. As I had begun to suspect during the threesome, Mond was in truth bisexual with a strong bias towards men; and indeed one of the purposes for which he so assiduously recruited the NAAFI girls was to try to assure himself that things were the other way about, that he was principally a womaniser and could take or leave ‘the other’ where he found it.
So what with the NAAFI sprees and the ‘working’ evenings (on which the boring Blitz was put aside earlier each time in order to allow more and more leisure for ‘the other’) the days went on happily enough. The only trouble was, of course, that both Mond and I had special duties, his to ‘Mrs Lou’ and mine to Isaacs and his XI, in the performance of which we were beginning to buckle. In Mond’s case, it was just possible to fob off Mrs Lou with the dexterous use of a device; in mine no such deceit or surrogation was possible. My game was going fast downhill: Isaacs’ face expressed surprise, then reproach, then irritation as failure succeeded failure; and my reputation was only (and very temporarily) restored by a fluky 47 against a scratch side of elderly Sappers.
