Frank Pike, the unworldly youth, was born in Weston-super-Mare, where he was brought up by his mother and his ‘Uncle Arthur’. He is, according to Mrs Pike, an exceptionally fragile young man who is plagued by such multiple ailments as croup, hay fever, sinusitis, sensitive skin, vertigo, a delicate chest, weak ankles and ‘nerves’; outside of her house, however, he displays a surprisingly healthy appetite for adventure. He is an avid reader, taking The Hotspur, Wizard and Film Pictorial each week, a regular listener to The Happidrome on the wireless, and he is a devoted – some might say obsessive – fan of the movies (he models himself, he likes to think, on such suave, romantic stars as Ronald Colman and William Powell). He works, by day, as a clerk at the bank, and, by night, as the youngest private in his platoon, and he is never happier than when he is entrusted with the town’s one and only tommy gun.5
It was Frazer, out of the three of them, whose oddity gave Mainwaring most cause for concern. Right from the start, when the self-appointed leader launched into his maiden speech, there, right in front of him, was the bushy-browed, wild-eyed, beaky, unsmiling Celt, daring him to turn something crooked into something straight: ‘We Englishmen,’ Mainwaring begins, only to check himself as Frazer growls menacingly beneath his breath. ‘We-we Britishers,’ the captain nervously extemporises, ‘um, w-we here … ’ From this point on, Frazer is Mainwaring’s fiercest critic, regularly casting doubt upon his judgement, maligning his character and keenly anticipating his come-uppance. Whenever a distinguished visitor is to be found in the commanding officer’s office, Frazer, invariably, is the member of the platoon who comes bursting through the door: ‘Hey! We’re all lined up out here waiting, waiting, and if you don’t come soon we’re all off home! I thought ye’d just like tae know!’ Mainwaring, smiling weakly, does his best to explain away such rude behaviour – ‘Rough diamond, that one. Heart of gold!’ – but privately he is seething. ‘He has the look of a communist about him,’ he tells Wilson. ‘I’ve noticed that when we’re on night duty he never plays Monopoly with the rest of the men.’
John Laurie was certainly nostalgic for his classical actorly past (when John Le Mesurier once asked him who, in his memory, ranked highest of all the Hamlets, he snapped back, ‘Me, laddie, me!’).6 In spite of this he clearly relished playing such an irascible, outspoken and deeply devious old creature. It had been half a century or so since Laurie had left his native Scotland – he and his wife, Oonah, had settled in England in a smart mock-Tudor house at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire – but he only needed to crank his old Dumfries accent up a notch or two in order to sound as if he had just come down, grudgingly, from some cold stone home in the auld country. Although he had played a Home Guard before – in the later scenes of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – and innumerable lugubrious Scots – such as Jamie, the doom-laden caretaker in The Ghost of St Michael’s, who regularly claims to have heard ‘the sound of the phantom pipes wailing through the castle’ – Frazer would prove to be his definitive comic caricature.
It was as if Mainwaring, the parochial little Englishman, had unwittingly conjured up this craggy Scot, stooping like a question mark, from out of his own nightmares: the jealously guarded stock of gold sovereigns, the old pre-Union phrases, the chatter about haggis, whisky and bagpipes, the secretive nature, the morbid occupation, and the eyes that are just a little too close together (‘denoting,’ according to Mainwaring, ‘a mean streak’) – each hoary cliché combined to create a formidably foreign figure, an exotic old gainsayer whose sole raison d’être, it sometimes seemed to Mainwaring, was to see his master ‘r-r-r-ruined’. The Scot’s storytelling does not help: whenever the captain calls for a morale-boosting contribution, Frazer can always be relied on to come up with something that seems to have been designed expressly to serve the opposite purpose: ‘I mind the time when I was a wee, wee laddie on the lone Isle of Barra. A submarine got sunk in Castle Bay, and seven b-r-r-r-ave men were trapped in it. The water got higher and higher and higher, until it got up to their necks, and then … Terrible way tae die!’7
The pedantry always niggles (MAINWARING: ‘We have one invaluable weapon in our armoury: ingenuity and improvisation.’ FRAZER: ‘That’s two!’), the rumour-mongering (‘I’m not one for tittle-tattle or gossip of any kind, but … ’) never fails to annoy, and the heckling (‘What a lot of blather he comes out with!’) is guaranteed to grate. The most worrying of Frazer’s traits, however, is his ill-disguised desire to dominate. He not only harbours hopes of supplanting Jones as lance corporal, he also dreams of taking over from Mainwaring as captain. On one occasion, for example, he startles his commander by revealing just how closely – and critically – he has been monitoring his performance:
FRAZER Cap’n Mainwaring, sir, I’ll come straight to the point: during the period we’ve been together you’ve wasted far too many hours of our precious time, and tonight’s lecture was the last straw!
MAINWARING Now look here, Frazer –
FRAZER Let me finish! I’ve made some careful notes of it all (puts on spectacles) and if you just ho’d on a wee (reaches into pocket for notebook) I’ll give you one or two items that might interest ye. (reading from notes) On November 6, 1940, you wasted thr-r-ree hours giving us a lecture on ‘Why the Germans Don’t Play Cricket’. On January 28, 1941, you gave us a lecture telling us how Hitler, when he is in a rage, ‘bites the carpet’.
MAINWARING It’s a well-known fact that he does!
FRAZER Maybe, but you then proceeded to waste two hours working out a plan on how to send him a poisoned hearth rug! According to my notes, it comes to a total of four hundred and thirty-eight hours wasted on useless blather! (removes spectacles) Well, that’s how I feel, and I had to come in and tell ye so to your face – er, no offence intended, you understand.8
Mainwaring rates this diatribe as ‘rank insubordination’, and even Wilson admits that it had been ‘rather strong’, but the decision to teach the troublemaker a lesson by allowing him, temporarily, to see for himself how hard it is to be in charge of the platoon only succeeds in revealing just how dictatorial, given the chance, he can be.
Frazer usually falls a fraction short, however, of outright rebellion. ‘I’m a simple man,’ he protests disingenuously whenever he fears that he has gone a little too far. ‘I speak ma mind and what’s in this hard auld Scottish heart.’ The irony is that his various snarls and schemes serve only to strengthen the status quo, reminding the other members of the platoon that even when things, under Mainwaring, are at their worst, they could always be worse still under the man waiting impatiently in the wings.
Things would certainly be worse for everyone without Walker – the man who supplies the platoon with such scarce wartime resources as alcohol, cigarettes, petrol coupons and the odd ‘stray’ item of equipment – which is why Mainwaring, the self-styled paragon of middle-class respectability, feels so uneasy in his presence. Walker reminds him that he is just as morally fallible, in certain circumstances, as the rest of his men: whenever Mainwaring has just finished administering a stern lecture to someone on the need for integrity, frugality and Olympian self-control, Walker, without fail, will stroll in bearing some incriminating little treat and spoil the sober effect (‘Ah. Yes. Er, that will be all, thank you, Walker’).
Mainwaring does not know how to respond to such a shamelessly ambiguous figure. Walker has no firm attachment to any particular industry, but he is undeniably industrious (‘That whisky you get every week don’t fall off a lorry on its own accord – it has to be pushed!’); he has a harshly modern mind (MAINWARING: ‘You’d sell your own grandmother, wouldn’t you?’ WALKER: ‘Well, there’s no market for ’er’), but has held on to an old-fashioned heart (he would much rather commit a good deed than a dirty trick); and he operates at the rim of society but still exerts an influence at the hub. Mainwaring simply cannot work out the reason why he, a pillar of the community, should find himself being leaned on by this louche individualist. When, for example, the
rule-abiding bank manager attends a much-anticipated local black-tie Rotarian dinner – ‘That’s what I like about these gatherings: everybody here represents a profession or a craft’ – he does not expect to rub shoulders with a rule-bending spiv:
WALKER Evening, Cap!
MAINWARING What are you doing here?
WALKER Well, why shouldn’t I be ’ere?
MAINWARING Well, I wasn’t aware that under-the-counter dealing’s a profession!
WALKER No – but it’s a craft, isn’t it? Anyway, if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t be knockin’ back that sherry. And those chicken croquettes you’re going to ’ave later would’ve been made of whale meat – instead of rabbit.9
Walker, much to Mainwaring’s chagrin, can always be trusted to lower the tone: not only does he undermine every lecture with his flippant, and sometimes rather crude, interventions (‘You’re being very tedious today, Walker!’), he also insists upon bringing his awfully common girlfriend, the brightly coloured Edith Parish, to all of the platoon’s social occasions (‘I don’t think that’s the class of girl we want here at all!’). Walker can also be trusted, however, to come up with, when it really matters, the kind of unconventional, inspired ideas that can turn a demoralising defeat into a brave little victory. He is, in short, the most reliable of rogues, and even Mainwaring, although he will never truly understand him, knows that he will always need him.
Mainwaring is by no means so sure that he needs someone quite like Pike. Every day in the bank, and every evening on parade, the gawky youth manages to elicit the same sharp exclamation: ‘You stupid boy!’ Mainwaring, whose marriage has not been blessed with the presence of children, is unsure whether to tame or train this strangely malleable, impressionable and unruly adolescent. He could do without the vague air of scandal that he discerns about the boy (‘Well, it’s no business of mine,’ he tells his queasy-looking sergeant, ‘but this is a very small town, Wilson. Tongues wag. People put two and two together … ’), and he could certainly do without the over-protective matriarch who countermands so many of his most solemn orders (‘Now look here, Pike: I’m running this platoon – not your mum, er, your mother!’). The root of Mainwaring’s unease runs deeper still than that: what he could most do without is a boy who behaves as if he is merely playing at being a soldier.
The war, to Mainwaring is deadly serious, but to Pike it is only a game. The Home Guard, to Mainwaring, is part of the proper Army, but to Pike it is simply an extension of the Scouts. Hand Pike a gun and he will run around the church hall shouting ‘Nya-ah-ah-ah!’ Send him anywhere near a stream and he will end up stumbling in (‘I’m all wet, Mr Mainwaring!’). Invite him to visualise the enemy, and his mind will wander off to that movie he saw last week in which Alan Ladd was held captive by William Bendix and Eddie Marr. Dress him up, for the purposes of a training exercise, as a Nazi officer, and he will be off, strutting about, saying such things as, ‘So! Ve are ze masters now, eh?’ and ordering ‘Sixteen shandys mit der ginger beer.’ To a man like Mainwaring, who thinks of his platoon as fighting on the front line, a boy like Pike, who still seems to be playing in the sandpit, is a particularly embarrassing kind of irritant.
Even Wilson, the indulgent ‘uncle-sergeant’, sometimes appears distinctly ill at ease in the company of this undisciplined but chronically inquisitive young character. It is not just the tried and tested threats that he dreads (‘I’ll tell Mum!’), it is also, and even more so, those occasional intimations of something bordering on a fully-grown insight:
PIKE Anyway, if you’ve got an ‘eadache it’s your own fault. By the time we’ve finished supper it’s always so late you never leave our house until after I’ve gone to bed, and then you’re back early for breakfast in the morning before I’m awake.
WILSON Well, you know, Frank, I always come round to your house for meals, because your mother has my ration book.
PIKE Yeah, well, what I can’t understand is: I never hear you leave and I never hear you come back again in the morning.
WILSON Yes, well, you see, I let myself in and out very quietly.
PIKE (sotto voce) You never do anything else quietly.10
Whereas Mainwaring fears that Pike will never mature (‘I can’t help thinking that boy’s slightly retarded!’), Wilson fears that it is only a matter of time before he does.
Nothing can be done. Pike, like Walker, like Frazer, is not the kind of crease that can ever be ironed out. Mainwaring might think of them as misfits, but at least they are his misfits, the local misfits, and they are in, like him, for the duration.
CHAPTER IX
The Old Fools
It’s not that age brings childhood back again, Age merely shows what children we remain.
GOETHE1
Why aren’t they screaming?
PHILIP LARKIN2
Frazer calls them ‘the old fools’: Jack Jones and Charles Godfrey, the mangy lionheart and the doddery gent. One of them is rolling back the years, the other one is reeling from them, but both are faithful, and neither will shy from the fight.
Jones was born in 1870. His extraordinary military career began in 1884, when he signed on as a drummer boy, and continued more or less uninterrupted until 1915, when, having risen to the rank of lance corporal, he was invalided out on account of his myopia. He then proceeded to open up a small butcher’s shop in Walmington-on-Sea, and found another use for the old, cold, steel, but he remained, at heart, a proud and passionate soldier. He built up his business, hired a young boy named Raymond to serve as his assistant, became an enthusiastic secretary of the local Darby and Joan Club, overcame the occasional attack of malaria and acquired a well-deserved reputation as the town’s most indefatigable raconteur. In 1940, just when even he seemed resigned to the fact that his fighting days were well and truly over, the call came again, and, after slipping his new commanding officer a couple of pounds of steak (‘compliments of the house, sir’), he entered the Home Guard with all of his many medals on display and his old rank intact.3
Godfrey is politely imprecise about the year of his birth – as, indeed, he is about anything else of a personal nature – but it is certainly clear that he came into the world an awfully long time ago. The Great War was not really his cup of tea – he was actually a conscientious objector – but he still managed to win the Military Medal for bravery while serving with the Medical Corps as a stretcher bearer at the Battle of the Somme. After working for more than thirty-five years behind the counter in the gentleman’s outfitting department of the Army and Navy Stores, he returned to live a leisurely life alongside his two spinster sisters, Cissy (a keen knitter) and Dolly (a dedicated maker of exceedingly good upside-down cakes), in Cherry Tree Cottage, Walmington-on-Sea. The idea of the Home Guard appealed to his chivalrous spirit, and although his weak bladder, coupled with his regular appointments at the local clinic, meant that he would sometimes have no choice but to ask to be excused, he signed up without the slightest hesitation, and soon found a cosy niche for himself as the platoon’s medical orderly.4
Mainwaring is prepared to indulge these two elderly men, because both of them share his commitment to the cause (and neither of them questions his authority). They, in turn, are prepared to indulge him, because, as Jones puts it, he is ‘our brave leader, our salvation’, and because, as Godfrey puts it, ‘I don’t like to let him down, you know, because he wouldn’t let me down.’
There was, Clive Dunn would admit, ‘an element of wartime revenge’5 in his portrayal of the Hitler-hating, bayonet-waving, Lance Corporal Jones. His own memories of being a prisoner of war, he noted, gave his performance ‘an added grrr’:6
Those years weren’t much fun. I remember one day when they took all our clothes away and stuck them in a big oven to delouse them, then marched us completely naked in just our boots five miles to the sea, right through the middle of the village. We were sprayed with carbolic, had a quick dip and were marched five miles back again the way we’d come … I just told myself i
t was another part. I only hoped that tomorrow I’d get a better one.7
He also relished the opportunity, via Jones’ rambling military anecdotes, to hint ‘at the failings of great men such as the terrible Lord Kitchener’.8 The only thing about the character that Dunn, at least initially, was unsure of was the line that became one of his most popular catchphrases: ‘That was the one expression I didn’t want to use. I thought the audience might find it a bit offensive [of me] to say, “They don’t like it up ’em!” But they loved it, of course. They love anything that’s a bit rude.’9
There was something rather poignant about Arnold Ridley’s performance as Godfrey. The veteran actor, who in his youth had not only been a keen and competent cricketer but had also played rugby for his home town of Bath, was in a constant state of discomfort due to the legacy of the wounds that he suffered at war (a serious injury to his left arm – sustained on the Somme – had rendered it virtually useless, his legs were riddled with shrapnel and a blow on the head that he received from the butt of a German soldier’s rifle had left him prone to occasional blackouts). Much of his on-screen frailty was still, despite all that, gamely exaggerated in order to create all of the requisite comic effects (when the pubs opened, Clive Dunn recalled, the normally slow-moving Ridley was capable of showing ‘a turn of speed worthy of the rugby three-quarter he once was’).10
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