The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  His opening line was memorable. Trubshawe and I were sipping something cool on the balcony of the Sliema Club when a voice behind us said ‘I’ve been looking all over Valletta for you two: that twerp in the Orderly Room told me that I should avoid you at all costs!’

  John was almost as tall as Trubshawe but built like a heavyweight fighter in his prime. A broken nose did nothing to dispel this impression. He, was extremely handsome in a dark, Celtic way and extremely hostile when drunk. Also, as Trubshawe succinctly put it, ‘the man puts in some very plucky work with the elbow’. Very soon after his arrival in Malta, John was posted to the Second Battalion and departed for India but during the few weeks he was with us, he made an indelible impression.

  He was devoted to animals and could not bear to see the Maltese drivers ill-treating their horses. When he saw one poor emaciated beast, straining uphill with a huge load of sandstone blocks, being belaboured with a heavy stick, he pulled the man off the shafts, put him across his knee and gave him six of the best with his swagger cane. John also introduced us to green beer.

  Trubshawe and I had been ordered by the Weasel to make all the arrangements for the annual Regimental Party at the Marsa Polo Club. Knowing we were given this assignment in the hopes that a normally deadly supper dance might be infused with something perhaps a little unusual, we went to great lengths planning to decorate the place differently and while Trubshawe spent days bashing some sort of rhythm into the regimental band, I busied myself with the catering aided by Mr. Gifford.

  Three weeks before the party, John told us about the green beer. It appeared that a brewer in Edinburgh had come up with this novelty and he quickly talked us into ordering it for the occasion. Cables were exchanged and to obtain a decent price per crate, we ordered an enormous amount of the stuff. The shipment arrived at the Docks just in time and the mule teams in the transport lines were hastily pressed into service to cart it to the Polo Club where Trubshawe and John and I were waiting to try it. It tasted all right but the colour, far from being the joyous sparkling creme de menthe we had anticipated, was that of some loathsome opaque and polluted pond.

  On the night of the party, acres of green bottles stood hopefully on the tables while the guests avoided them like the plague and drank everything else in sight.

  The next day, the Weasel sent for the Raspberry Pickers and said that it was our responsibility to get rid of the green beer. We thought we might be able to ‘con’ the sergeants’ mess into buying some. So together with John Royal we organised, one Sunday, a sergeants’ mess picnic, the idea being that if we gave the sergeants enough of it free and slipped them a lot of whisky to help it down, they might overlook its horrendous colour and relieve the officers’ mess of a sizeable portion of the stock.

  It didn’t work, of course. We took several carloads of sergeants, sandwiches, whisky and crates and crates of beer to a remote bay and for hours a glorious time was had by all—swimming, singing, telling exaggerated regimental anecdotes, boasting and drinking. In an effort to get them hooked on the stuff, the three of us, while carefully leaving the whisky out of our own mugs, dreamed up toast after toast, but as the evening approached, wild highland cries became fewer and the sound of snores and throwing up became the norm. When finally we delivered our subdued charges back to the sergeants’ mess, it was all too plain that we had overplayed our hand: to a man they swore they would never touch the stuff again.

  I remember the end of that picnic very clearly because the pipe major was so drunk that ‘Sixty’ Smith and I had to put him to bed and valiantly trying to get his kilt off while he was thrashing around and muttering obscenities in Gaelic, we unveiled an elderly pair of green regimental boxing shorts. There is always speculation about what a true Scot wears under the kilt: here was additional evidence that it is a very personal decision.

  John Royal departed for India the same day that Trubshawe became engaged to Margie Macdougall. Neither event ended well but John’s problem came to a head first.

  Soon after his arrival, the officers of the Second Battalion were invited to a ball given by the local maharajah and John became sleepy, so after dinner he lay down behind some potted palms and stole forty winks. He was awakened by a captain of a cavalsy regiment who stirred him, none too gently, with his foot.

  ‘Stand up,’ said the Captain. John stood.

  ‘You are drunk,’ said the Captain.

  ‘You are right,’ said John and flattened him with a left hook. He then composed himself once more behind the potted palms. Pretty soon he was awakened again, this time by a full colonel of Artillery.

  ‘Stand up,’ said the. Colonel. John stood.

  ‘You are drunk,’ said the Colonel and collected a right cross.

  John was court-martialled and insisted on conducting his own defence. He had been dropped on his head as a baby, he said, and this had the unfortunate effect of making him lash out at the first person he saw when he was woken from a deep sleep.

  The prosecuting officer smiled faintly. ‘Perhaps you would tell the court what happens to your batman when he wakes you up in the morning?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said John unmoved. ‘I have issued him with a fencing mask.’ John left India and the Army and I did not see him again for ten years. Margie Macdougall left Malta and Trubshawe was saddened. He was comforted by the beautiful Mrs. Tower and rallied strongly. Trubshawe had decided that perhaps the Weasel had a point when he hinted that there were other things that Trubshawe might do better than soldiering.

  ‘When Margie and I marry, old son, we’ll live in the depths of the country in some beautiful village. I’ll run the cricket club and Margie can hand out pheasants to the tenants…of course a lot depends on the local brewer.’ My twenty-first birthday came and went and I was still on that island. Every day it seemed to get smaller. Rumours were constantly flying that the battalion was to be reinforced and sent to Egypt, to China, or to Singapore but nothing ever happened and after each flurry of excitement, the battalion settled further back into its torpor. Trubshawe was now determined to resign his commission within a year so I asked officially to be seconded for service with the West African Frontier Force, a ploy that would have given me an exciting change of scenery and considerably more pay. The Weasel refused to recommend it.

  My last year in Malta was enlivened by two things. First, I was made transport officer and as such, spent my days in the stables with several dozen chargers, draft-horses and mules. The mules were a belligerent lot; probably they had an inferiority complex because they did nothing except pull the company cookers. It was a splendid sight to see a company on the march. At the back and always falling further and further behind, were a couple of mules hauling an immense black cauldron on wheels. Inside this, depending on the time of day, was either boiling tea or boiling stew. Both tasted much the same but, at all times, behind the cauldron, was the company cook enveloped in a cloud of steam and stirring the contents as he marched.

  Sergeant Fensham was the transport sergeant, a gay bandy-legged little man with the broken-veined complexion that goes with the proximity of horses. He was ready for every four-legged emergency. If the Colonel’s horse was too fresh, before an important ceremonial parade, he would calm it down with a jab of tranquilliser. Once he gave it too much and we both watched apprehensively as, with rolling eyes, it tottered about with its precarious cargo in front of several thousand onlookers.

  Someone with a distinguished military background died in Sliema and a military funeral was arranged so I was ordered to produce a team and gun-carriage to bear the coffin. Sergeant Fensham paraded the six blackest draft horses we had and towing the black gun carriage, we set off to pick up our cargo.

  In the middle of Valletta, one of the horses fell down and grazed its knee. Somehow it knocked off a divot of black hair and exposed a few square inches of hard chalky-white skin. This ruined our carefully arranged black ensemble but Fensham reached into his saddle bag, produced a box of black Cherry Blossom boot polish,
and we went on our way without missing a beat. The other boredom reliever of those last twelve months was the fancy dress ball in the Opera House. It was a predictable show—admirals dressed as pierrots, their wives as columbines. Bo-peeps were plentiful and there was a sprinkling of Old Bills and Felix the Cats among the military. Parties took boxes in the lovely tiered building and everyone tried hard to pretend that it was every bit as gay and abandoned as the Chelsea Arts Ball. Trubshawe and I went as goats.

  First we put noisome rugs on our backs. Then horns on bands were fixed to our heads and finally, between our legs, for the goat fittings, footballs swung with rubber gloves sewn on to them by the regimental cobbler. Half a pint of dry martinis apiece and we were ready for the fray.

  We arrived just in time for the Grand March for the prizegiving. The judges for the best costumes were on the stage and round and round in front of them, two by two, like the animals going into the Ark, went the clowns with their red hot pokers, the ballet dancers and the Mickey Mice.

  Rumblings of disapproval rose from the boxes as the two drunken goats joined in at the back of the parade.

  ‘Trubshawe…Niven…goats! Bad show! Damn bad show!’ Military moustaches and naval eyebrows bristled from every floor.

  I’m getting dizzy, old man,’ said the goat behind me after we had completed several circuits.

  ‘Left wheel!’

  Obediently, I turned out of the parade towards the empty centre of the floor.

  ‘Now squat!’ commanded Trubshawe.

  ‘What?’ I asked apprehensively.

  ‘Squat, you bloody fool.’

  So there at the very hub of the wheel with a kaleidoscope of colour circling round us and the focus of hundreds of disapproving eyes I squatted. Trubshawe produced a brown paper bag from the folds of his smelly rug and sprinkled black olives on the floor directly behind me.

  Except in the box that held David Kilburn and Anthony Pleydell-Bouverie, this flourish was coldly received by the ticket holders, particularly by a party of Maltese students who had a very short fuse when they thought that someone was mocking the local institutions. They jostled and shoved us as we left the floor and made threatening noises.

  ‘Better take off, old man,’ said my leader as he headed for the exit and the last I saw of Trubshawe that night he was pounding down the main street of Valletta towards the sanctuary of the Union Club pursued by the hornet students and tripping over his ‘udders’.

  We were confined to barracks for that little adventure but the boredom of our incarceration was soon relieved by the arrival of a whole new spate of rumours. This time they had a ring of truth to them. The Quarter-Master was seen checking the winter stores and, in the Transport Lines, Sergeant Fensham hinted darkly that he had heard that we might have to find buyers for some of our animals. The Weasel was seen strutting around, obviously having tucked into a sizeable canary.

  In fact the battalion had been ordered home to the British Isles—to the Citadel Barracks, Dover. It was like some gloriously prolonged ‘end of term’ and when the evacuation order was finally given, the whole battalion set about their allotted tasks with a willingness I had not hitherto seen.

  ‘Sixty’ Smith, who had become my friend and adviser, was ill in hospital. It started with sandfly fever, then complications and now he was much more sick than anybody realised. Pleurisy had set in and there was no question of him sailing home with the rest of us. I went to see him the day before we embarked on the troopship and was shocked by his appearance.

  ‘Would you ask the Colonel a favour for me, sorr? Would ye ask if the battalion could march a wee bit oot the road on their way tae the Dock so I can hear the pipes for the last time—it’s nae far…aboot five minutes.’

  I suddenly felt chilly in the warm little room. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Sixty?…hearing the pipes for the last time?’

  ‘Becos I’m gonna dee,’ Sixty replied quietly and I found it impossible to look into his clouded eyes.

  The Weasel was oddly sympathetic to the request and when he gave me the answer he told me the Colonel had added that he would like me to be with the old man when the troops passed the hospital the following day. It was late afternoon when they passed and the sun was golden on the church spires that Sixty could see from his bed. In the distance he could hear the swinging march: ‘Wi’ a Hundred Pipers…’ and he asked me to prop him up in his bed. Nearer and nearer came the battalion and as he lifted his head to listen, he must have been thinking of a whole lifetime in the regiment he had joined as a boy. Just before the column reached the hospital, the tune changed: changed to the regimental march—‘Scotland the Brave’—and tears of pride slid down his granite cheeks. He sat bolt upright till the last stirring notes faded away into the distance, then he slid down into his bed and turned his face to the wall.

  That night Sixty died. The troopship was a hell-ship of about 11,000 tons and bursting at the seams with men from every regiment on their way home from various parts of the Empire. For four days she was hove-to in the Bay of Biscay in a storm of Wagnerian proportions. Life in the troop decks in the bowels of the ship was unbelievably awful but the Jocks rose above the overcrowding and the smell of vomit by keeping their minds on the fact that at last they were off the island of Malta and headed in the right direction. We arrived in the Citadel Barracks, Dover, a few days before Christmas. It was a place of undiluted gloom. A grass-covered fortress, high in the mist above the slate-roof Victorian horror of the town below, but as we marched into the barracks, on that drizzly December evening, there was not a man among us who did not rejoice.

  The Weasel sent practically everyone in the battalion home on leave. A skeleton party of caretakers stayed behind and as we were still under the cloud caused by the goat episode, the two officer skeletons were Trubshawe and myself. It was really quite enjoyable and a great relief to be de-Weaseled for a while.

  Hogmanay at the turn of the year was as boisterous an affair as usual and over at the canteen Cook Sergeant Winters gave the fifty members of the caretaker party a sizeable spread of haggis with all the trimmings and, following regimental tradition, the officers waited on the men. Trubshawe was at his very best belting out an endless stream of songs on the tinny canteen piano while toasts were offered and accepted.

  The following day was a day of shock for the Raspberry Pickers. We rose late with appalling hangovers and were gloomily gazing out of the window of the officers’ mess whence far below it was sometimes possible to see the English Channel through the murk. After the sauna-bath climate of Malta, the penetrating damp of the Dover heights could only be combated by a concoction of Trubshawe’s called ‘The Heart Starter’—port and brandy mixed. We were doing our best to get warm when the door behind us opened and the solitary mess waiter stood there making spastic movements of the head and shoulders, rolling his eyes and jerking his thumb over his shoulder. When he stepped aside, the reason for his alarm became clear: Behind him was a real live Major General. A lean and very formidable figure, he walked briskly into the room. The red band on his hat and red tabs on his collar sowed instant alarm in our breasts and this was not diluted by the sight of General Staff armbands on the Major and Captain immediately behind him.

  ‘Where is your Commanding Officer?’

  ‘On leave, sir,’ said Trubshawe.

  ‘Adjutant?’

  ‘On leave, sir,’ said I.

  ‘Who is the senior officer present?’

  ‘I am, sir,’ said Trubshawe.

  ‘I don’t mean in this room,’ snapped the General, ‘in the barracks.’

  ‘Still me, sir,’ said Trubshawe and tried a misguided smile of welcome. ‘Can we offer you a little something to keep out the cold.’

  There was an ominous silence while the man treated us to a long, penetrating stare. Then he turned and held some sort of low-keyed high-level military discussion with his staff. The Major and the Captain changed colour noticeably and we got the distinct impression that someone had
blundered.