Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘This boy, Le Bas,’ she said, ‘I know the name.’

  ‘You do. Head of the School my last summer.’

  ‘Yes. One of the boys who got up to filthy tricks, like you.’

  ‘Can’t we forget all that.’

  ‘If only we could. But now you’re going off to get up to those filthy tricks again at Lord’s.’

  ‘We’re simply going to watch the cricket.’

  ‘Cricket. Nothing but filthy boys like this Le Bas, playing filthy tricks in the changing rooms…etc, etc…and anyway,’ said my mother half an hour later, after poor Hedley was finally disposed of, ‘what are you going to use for money?’

  ‘I’ve got ten pounds.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Grandpa sent it.’

  ‘GRANDPA…sent you ten pounds? Without asking me? We’ll see about that.’

  She flew to the telephone and excoriated her unfortunate parent for fifteen minutes flat.

  ‘I’ve made him agree to cancel the cheque,’ she said when she came back, ‘he quite sees, now, that he shouldn’t give you money to encourage silly ideas of independence.’

  ‘Too late. I cashed it at the bank this morning. Special clearance.’

  ‘You…deceitful…little…pig,’ mouthed my mother, with all the venom (rather a lot) which she had in her.

  But the show was over. Game, set and match to me. My mother, although one of the most infuriating and possessive women I have ever known, knew when she was beaten (which in those days wasn’t often) and was skilful at assuming a kind of hurt and sorrowful quietude which, with cleverly interposed acts of kindness, was intended to make one feel guilty – and did. By ten o’clock that evening, so tender had been her concern about what I would like to eat and to do ‘on your last night at home’, so wistful had been her asides about how ‘Myles and I will miss you’, that I was on the verge of renunciation. However, Myles saw this coming and took me on one side, ‘Don’t give in,’ he said. ‘You know how you’ll enjoy yourself at Lord’s. You mustn’t let yourself be blackmailed any more than you let yourself be bullied.’

  Good words and true; but justify myself as I might, I had not a moment’s mental peace during the whole journey to London.

  ‘Happy days are here again,’ said Hedley Le Bas outside the Tavern. ‘A pity about that infernal row down at Charterhouse, but I think we’re over the worst of it.’

  Hedley, skilful operator that he was, had managed to make his part in the Great Scandal appear marginal, whereas in truth it had been central. He was helped by his already having left the school when the scandal broke, which mummy’s Boy meant that he could not be summoned and grilled like the rest of us but at the same time could always protest, from a safe distance, that he was being misrepresented. The end of it was that Hedley had been forbidden to appear on Carthusian territory for one calendar year but was not otherwise penalised. Since the year would very soon be done (mid-October) he was indeed ‘over the worst of it’. I, on the other hand, was not. It might be many years before I was admitted to the Old Carthusian Club, about which I did not particularly care, or allowed to play cricket for The Friars (the old boys’ touring side) about which I cared very much. But I saw no point in going into that now: Hedley would only think I was being envious and dreary, and he would be right.

  ‘Take my word for it,’ he was saying, ‘old Bags [Birley] knows the ways of the world as well as anyone living. Although he may be playing it rather stiff and stuffy just now, he’ll come round just as soon as he sees that we’re not letting it get us down. In my case, I was accepted for a Commission in the Life Guards, then they found my heart was a bit dicky, so I was given an immediate place, in mid-term, at Jesus – returning heroes or no returning heroes, they found room for me fast enough. All done by money, of course, and Bags knows that as well as I do, but it looks pretty good in the score book: so I’m more or less forgiven already, and by October it’ll all be as if it had never been. More beer?’

  ‘Yes please, Hedley.’

  ‘As for you, they’ll take you back into the fold just as soon as you get a Commission – and never mind how you got it. The India thing will impress them too. To be an Officer in India is in fact about as unsmart as you can get, but it sounds all right to the middle classes, and Bags is nothing if not middle class. Have a whisky with that beer. You drink half the beer in one go, then all the whisky in one go, then pour the whisky drops into the rest of the beer and then drink that in one go.’

  ‘Where did you learn that trick? In the Life Guards or at Jesus?’

  ‘In a pub by the Mill Road. Some of us from Jesus go there to pick up women.’

  ‘I hope you don’t pick up anything else.’

  ‘Been lucky so far. Anyhow, all that’s got to stop because I’m thinking of getting married.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘Must have a son, old boy. Le Bas must have a son.’

  ‘But already? Surely, if there’s one thing more unsmart than another, it’s an early marriage?’

  I had him there; but Hedley was saved, as the likes of Hedley are always saved, by sheer chance, which this time took the shape of Gerald Carter, a plodding but good-humoured member of the XI the year previous to our own.

  ‘What cheer, old chums? Let’s have another of what you were both having. Dismal match, this. I thought it was meant to be a Festival.’

  ‘They’re all trying to look good in the score book,’ I said, ‘to fatten up their chances for next year. Although they may call this a Festival, the new era we live in has no time for all that sort of amateur rot. It’s graft and grind from now on.’

  ‘I rather think you’re right,’ said Hedley, taking a beer and a whisky from Gerald. ‘Have you noticed that none of the amateurs are wearing club caps or sweaters, Free Foresters or Harlequins or anything like that? They always did before the war, but now they’ve been told to wear county colours or nothing. Democracy, you see. It upsets the pros to look at them in their pretty striped blazers.’

  ‘It never upset George or Rainsford,’ I said, and drank the second half of the beer Gerald had given me (complete with whisky drops).

  ‘George was too good a player to worry about that kind of thing, and Rainsford was too bad. The sort that are complaining are the mediocre lot – they’re always the ones that carry the chips. Blight, P, of Notts – that kind of crap.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Gerald, accepting a fresh beer and whisky from my hands. ‘Look what happened the other day down in Kent. Ladies’ Day at Canterbury, sun shining, band playing ‘Blue Danube’ on the boundary, everyone as happy as larks in the sky, and then what happens? Some grimy little pro complains that the music is putting him off. “Fuck that,” says the Umpire, “it never put Frank Wolley off. You just play on.” (Thank you, Hedley: same again). Then blow me, ten minutes later the same beastly squirt says that the sun shining on the instruments is upsetting him. “You mingy bugger,” says the Umpire, “why don’t you send for yer cap? That’s what it’s for, to keep the sun out of yer eyes.” “I haven’t yet got my cap,” says Ferret-face, “and what’s more I never shall if I have to play in these conditions.” “Conditions?” says the Umpire. “Look you here, laddie: if Les Ames and Arthur Fagg could put up with a band now and then, so can a manky sod like you.” So of course the little brute didn’t get his way, but you see what a pass things have come to? Some puking junior pro, who hasn’t even got his county cap, daring to complain about the Band at Canterbury. They’ll start a Union next. Don’t they know they’re simply there to entertain us?’

  ‘I fear,’ I said, ‘that we have been born into the wrong age. Just a hundred years too late. (Thank you, Gerald, I don’t mind if I do.) We should have been happier with top hats and round arm.’

  ‘And proper grovelling from the Lower Classes,’ said Hedley.

  Later on, after some of the base mechanicals also drinking at the Tavern had become hostile to our little group, Hedley drove me to the Norfolk
Hotel near South Kensington Tube Station, at that time a creaking and crumbling private hostelry which my family always used when in London. As we rounded Hyde Park Corner, I said, ‘I’m terribly thorry, Hedley old bean, but I musht have a pith.’

  ‘A pith?’

  ‘A weedle-weedle.’

  ‘A weedle-weedle?’

  ‘For Chrisht’s shake, man: a PEE.’

  ‘God,’ said Hedley, ‘that again.’

  ‘It’th quite all right, old faggot. The Law shays I can go on either of your off-shide wheelsh.’

  ‘In Knightsbridge?’

  ‘It’s either in Knightshbridge, or it’sh in your car.’

  Hedley stopped (in those days you could, wherever and whenever you wanted).

  ‘Make it the rear wheel,’ he said, ‘it’s rather muddy.’

  ‘The byelaw,’ said James Prior, ‘under which you thought you were permitted to urinate on the off-side wheel of a stationary vehicle, has long since been rescinded.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Notions of public decency. Increase of public provision for relief. Sheer bloody hypocrisy and prudishness. But the fact remains that it has been rescinded, and that you could have been arrested and charged with perpetrating an obscene nuisance – and then goodbye to your Commission. For Jesus Christ’s sake, stay out of trouble until you’ve passed out of Bangalore.’

  James and I were on the deck of the Troopship Georgic, watching the flying fish as they played among the waves of the Indian Ocean. James had done his Primary and Infantry training with the Greenjackets: by a marvellous stroke of luck (for me at least) the potential officers of his intake had been posted to Bangalore with the same draft and in the same Cadet Platoon as myself.

  ‘I’ve been finding out about Bangalore,’ James said now. ‘It’s not like an English OCTU, where they’ll toss you out for showing a fly button. By the time they’ve transported you to Bangalore, they’ve invested so much money in you that they’ve got to pass you through with a Commission. All you have to do, Simon, is to sit there politely and let the thing go on; and after the prescribed number of weeks you will march off the parade ground as Second Lieutenant Raven. For Christ’s sake, and all our sakes, do it. Do it, and everyone will forgive you everything, because a Commission means success and success means exculpation. Do it, and Bags Birley, Bob Arrowsmith and the Uncle will stand in line to welcome you down to Charterhouse again with open arms and beaming faces.

  ‘But if you make a mess of this,’ James rumbled on, ‘if you are so wilful or perverse or plain stupid as to make a fuck-up where it is, by common consent, almost impossible to make a fuck-up, then you’ll have ditched yourself for good and all, and bloody well serve you right.’

  ‘Hedley said much the same at Lord’s.’

  ‘Of course he did. He knows the way the world goes round.’

  ‘But we must…well…have some fun at Bangalore.’

  ‘Of course we must. We’ll have all the fun that’s going, we will have food and drink and expeditions and parties of pleasure, but what we will not have is sex. Repeat after me, Simon: NO SEX’

  ‘NO SEX.’

  ‘No sex with the other Cadets, because even at Bangalore they’ll draw the line at that. No sex with white women, even if readily available, because British women in India are, by and large, idle, conceited, pampered and promoted far above their proper class. They are therefore even more prone than most of their sex to interference and malice, and are to be avoided at any cost. And no sex with native women, if only because they stink.’

  ‘What about half-castes? I’m told they’re very appetising.’

  ‘So they may be. But they probably have the pox and they certainly have native mothers who chew betel nut.’

  VII

  RAVEN SAHIB

  When we arrived in India we were sent to a Transit Camp called Khalyan (near Bombay) to await transport that would take us South to Bangalore. The only features of the place which I can still remember are a weird conical mountain which spiralled up over it and a seedy fairground with a Death Wall Rider.

  ‘Transit Camps mean idleness and trouble,’ said James, ‘we must organise occupations for ourselves.’

  ‘I’m told we can get twelve hour passes to go to Bombay,’ I said.

  ‘And what would you do when you got there, I’d like to know? We shall stay here, Simon, and I shall go to the Officer who is in nominal charge of us, and we shall have football matches and cricket matches and swimming matches and cross-country running matches and –’

  ‘– Isn’t that enough to be going on with?’

  Some of these things we certainly had, and in this way James continued to keep most of us out of trouble during the very long three weeks during which we lingered in Khalyan. The cricket match in particular was a huge success because of the spectacular comeuppance with which it served Spotty Duvell.

  Spotty Duvell (MM) was an ex-Sergeant-Major (very much with a ‘g’) and Glider Pilot. Now, as a general rule, Warrant Officers who were found fit to hold combatant Commissions at that time were commissioned straight away in the rank of Lieutenant and did not have to undergo training as Officer Cadets. But the authorities had clearly decided that Spotty needed a bit of polishing first, and to India he duly sailed in the good ship Georgic with the other 300-odd of us. There was a good deal of controversy as to his exact status. Spotty maintained that until we arrived at Bangalore he would still hold the King’s Warrant and enjoy the rank of Company Sergeant-Major (after all, he was still being paid as such) and that he was therefore entitled to the absolute obedience of the rest of us who were still only Private Soldiers. Nonsense, we said: we had now been instructed to assume the insignia of Officer Cadets; all of us had been so instructed, including Spotty Duvell, so he could jolly well take down his crown and laurel wreath (in 1946 CSMs still wore both) and put up white shoulder tabs along with the fellow-Cadets who were now his peers.

  Spotty did indeed put up white tabs, and also fixed the complementary white celluloid disk behind his regimental cap badge, but he did not take the crown and laurel wreath off his sleeve. All right, so he was an Officer Cadet: he was also a Sergeant-Major. As it happened, this concept very much suited the Officer who had been given the charge of us while we remained in Khalyan: he was short of Warrant Officers, Cadets in transit were notorious for putting on airs with noncommissioned ranks, so let them have their own Cadet Warrant Officer to keep the little buggers in order. Thus authority upheld Spotty’s claim, which was thereafter reluctantly conceded.

  It followed, of course, that it should have been Spotty who formed up to suggest the programme of games and matches, whereas it had in fact been James. For Spotty was not an initiator, he was a natural other rank loiterer, who would have been only too glad to hang about, vacant and atrophied, for our entire stay in Khalyan. He therefore resented James’ action on several levels, and set about trying to discredit the activities which James had put in train by giving loud-mouthed imitations of the Public School accent (‘Bah Jove, what a supah toe-ah, Aubrah old sport, whaaaat’) and, more harmfully, by ordering people to leave the field in mid-match or mid-race and report for some nugatory fatigue which he had got up out of sheer malice.

  Of all the fixtures which had been set up, the one Spotty Duvell most loathed was the cricket match. (‘Bah Jove, the mater and the pater are coming to watch us play crickah at Lord’s, whaaat. Don’t forget your topper, Claude, etc, etc.’) No sooner was the first over bowled than Spotty came strutting down to the ground (a murram square with matting wicket) accompanied by his henchman, Syd Tasker, an ex-Sergeant of Military Police.

  ‘Now let’s see, Sergeant,’ said Spotty. ‘We need five men to clean out the latrines.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I think we might detail these men who are sitting here doing nothing. Men, did I say? More like a row of little girls at their first dance, legs together in case they piss their knickers… You,’ yapped Spotty, ‘you you you and you, report to
the latrines at the double.’

  ‘Excuse me, Sergeant-Major,’ said James, who was Captain of the side that was batting, ‘these Cadets are members of my team and are waiting to go in to bat.’

  ‘You speak when you’re spoken to, Cadet Prior,’ said Sergeant Tasker. ‘You you you you and you.’

  ‘If you take them,’ said James civilly, ‘you will spoil our match.’

  ‘Oh, jolly poor show, whaat, fraightful shame, Monty old chap, and what will his lordship the Marquis say,’ snarled Spotty. ‘Got ears, have you, lads? You you you you and you.’

  I myself was the third ‘you’, and I did not like the way things were going. For a moment the match continued, but uneasily. By now the fieldsmen were fully aware what was up, and when ‘Over’ was next called they crossed with furtive, scurrying movements, as if about to be detected in criminal conspiracy.

  ‘There are plenty of people available to clean the latrines,’ said James equably, ‘who are not playing in this match…which, incidentally, has been organised with the permission of the Officer i/c Draught.’

  ‘Who you went crawling to when I wasn’t looking,’ said Spotty with naked malignance.

  ‘Only because you arranged nothing for us…sir.’

  ‘Watch yourself, Prior. You’re not too important to be put in close arrest… and have those pretty white tabs taken off your shoulder. Now then, you lot: for the last time: you you you you and you.’

  ‘I suppose it’s no good my appealing to your kindness?’

  ‘Christ almighty, it brings tears to my eyes, it really does. Poor little toffs, and did the horrid, wicked mans spoil their nice cricket game. You, you, YOU, YOU and –’

  ‘– I have a note here from the Officer i/c Draught,’ said James, producing it, ‘which specifically exempts from today’s fatigues all those selected to play in this cricket match, including the two twelfth men, and also two umpires, two scorers, and two men to operate the tally-wag. Here is the list, sir: these five Cadets are all on it.’ And then to us, ‘Please do not disturb yourselves, gentlemen.’