‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, rubbing his hands in glee, ‘surprised you!’
‘Good Lord, yes!’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many toy soldiers.’
‘It’s taken me years to amass them,’ he said, ‘years. I get ’em from a factory, you know. I get ’em unpainted and paint ’em myself. Much better that way. Get a smoother, cleaner job . . . More realistic, too.’
I bent down and picked up one of the tiny soldiers. It was quite true, what the Colonel had said. Normally a tin soldier is a fairly botchy job of painting, but these were meticulously done. Even the faces appeared to have expressions on them.
‘Now,’ said the Colonel. ‘Now. We’ll have a quick game – just a sort of run-through. Once you get the hang of it we can make it more complicated, of course. Now, I’ll explain the rules to you.’
The rules of the game, as explained by the Colonel, were fairly straightforward. You each had an army. You threw two dice and the one who got the highest score was the aggressor and it was his turn to start first. He threw his dice and from the number that came up he could move a battalion of his men in any direction that he pleased, and he was allowed to fire off a barrage from his field guns or anti-aircraft guns. These worked on a spring mechanism and you loaded them with matchsticks. The springs in these guns were surprisingly strong and projected the matchsticks with incredible velocity down the room. Where every matchstick landed, in a radius of some four inches around it, was taken to be destroyed. So if you could gain a direct hit on a column of troops you could do savage damage to the enemy. Each player had a little spring tape measure in his pocket for measuring the distance round the matchstick.
I was enchanted by the whole idea, but principally because it reminded me very much of a game that we had invented when we were in Greece. My brother Leslie, whose interest in guns and boats is insatiable, had collected a whole navy of toy battleships and cruisers and submarines. We used to range them out on the floor and play a game very similar to the Colonel’s, only we used to use marbles in order to score direct hits on the ships. Rolling a marble accurately over a bumpy floor in order to hit a destroyer an inch and a half long took a keen eye. It turned out, after we had thrown the first dice, that I was to be the aggressor.
‘Hah!’ said the Colonel. ‘Filthy Hun!’
I could see that he was working himself into a war-like mood.
‘Is the object of the exercise to try and capture your fort?’ I inquired.
‘Well, you can do that,’ he said. ‘Or you can knock it out, if you can.’
I soon discovered that the way to play the Colonel’s game was to distract his attention from one flank so that you could do some quick manoeuvring while he was not aware of it, so I kept up a constant barrage on his troops, the matches whistling down the room, and while doing this I moved a couple of battalions up close to his lines.
‘Swine!’ the Colonel would roar every time a matchstick fell and he had to measure the distance. ‘Dirty swine! Bloody Hun!’ His face grew quite pink and his eyes watered copiously so that he had to keep removing his monocle and polishing it.
‘You’re too bloody accurate,’ he shouted.
‘Well, it’s your fault,’ I shouted back, ‘you’re keeping all your troops bunched together. They make an ideal target.’
‘It’s part of me strategy. Don’t question me strategy. I’m older than you, and superior in rank.’
‘How can you be superior in rank, when I’m in command of an army?’
‘No lip out of you, you whippersnapper,’ he roared.
So the game went on for about two hours, by which time I had successfully knocked out most of the Colonel’s troops and got a foothold at the bottom of his fort.
‘Do you surrender?’ I shouted.
‘Never!’ said the Colonel. ‘Never! Surrender to a bloody Hun? Never!’
‘Well in that case I’m going to bring my sappers in,’ I said.
‘What are you going to do with your sappers?’
‘Blow up your fort,’ I said.
‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘Against the articles of war.’
‘Nonsense!’ I said. ‘The Germans don’t care about articles of war, anyway.’
‘That’s a filthy trick to play!’ he roared, as I successfully detonated his fort.
‘Now do you surrender?’
‘No. I’ll fight you every inch of the way, you Hun!’ he shouted, crawling rapidly across the floor on his hands and knees and moving his troops frantically. But all his efforts were of no avail; I had him pinned in a corner and I shot him to pieces.
‘By George!’ said the Colonel when it was all over, mopping his brow, ‘I’ve never seen anybody play that game like that. How did you manage to get so damned accurate when you haven’t played it before?’
‘Well, I’ve played a similar game, only we used marbles for that,’ I said. ‘But I think once you’ve got your eye in . . . it helps.’
‘Gad!’ said the Colonel, looking at the destruction of his army. ‘Still, it was a good game and a good fight. Shall we have another one?’
So we played on and on, the Colonel getting more and more excited, until at last I glanced at my watch and saw to my horror that it was one o’clock in the morning. We were in the middle of a game and so we left the troops where they were and on the following night I went back and finished it. After that I would spend two or three evenings a week with the Colonel, fighting battles up and down the long room, and it gave him tremendous pleasure – almost as much pleasure as it gave me.
Not long after that, my mother announced that she had finally found a house and that we could move out of London. I was bitterly disappointed. It meant that I would have to give up my job and lose contact with my friend Mr Bellow and Colonel Anstruther. Mr Romilly was heartbroken.
‘I shall never find anybody to replace you,’ he said. ‘Never.’
‘Oh, there’ll be somebody along,’ I said.
‘Ah, but not with your ability to decorate cages and things,’ said Mr Romilly. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.’
When the day finally came for me to leave, with tears in his eyes, he presented me with a leather wallet. On the inside it had embossed in gold ‘To Gerald Durrell from his fellow workers’. I was a bit puzzled since there had been only Mr Romilly and myself, but I suppose that he thought it looked better like that. I thanked him very much and then I made my way for the last time down Potts Lane to Mr Bellow’s establishment.
‘Sorry to see you go, boy,’ he said. ‘Very sorry indeed. Here . . . I’ve got this for you – a little parting present.’
He put a small square cage in my hands and sitting inside it was the bird that I most coveted in his collection, the Red Cardinal. I was overwhelmed.
‘Are you sure you want me to have it?’ I said.
‘Course I am, boy. Course I am.’
‘But, is it the right time of year for giving a present like this?’ I inquired.
Mr Bellow guffawed.
‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said. ‘Of course it is.’
I took my leave of him and then I went round that evening to play a last game with the Colonel. When it was over – I had let him win – he led me downstairs.
‘Shall miss you, you know, my boy. Shall miss you greatly. However, keep in touch, won’t you? Keep in touch. I’ve got a little, um . . ., a little souvenir here for you.’
He handed me a slim silver cigarette case. On it had been written ‘With love from Margery’. I was a bit puzzled by this.
‘Oh, take no notice of the inscription,’ he said. ‘You can have it removed . . . present from a woman . . . I knew once. Thought you’d like it. Memento, hmmm?’
‘It’s very, very kind of you sir,’ I said.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ he said, and blew his nose and polished his monocle and held out his hand. ‘Well, good luck, my boy. And I hope I’ll see you again one day.’
I never did se
e him again. He died shortly afterwards.
4. A Question of Promotion
Mamfe is not the most salubrious of places, perched as it is on a promontory above the curve of a great, brown river and surrounded by dense rain forest. It is as hot and moist as a Turkish bath for most of the year, only deviating from this monotony during the rainy season when it becomes hotter and moister.
At that time it had a resident population of five white men, one white woman, and some ten thousand vociferous Africans. I, in a moment of mental aberration, had made this my headquarters for an animal collection expedition and was occupying a large marquee full of assorted wild animals on the banks of the brown, hippo-reverberating river. In the course of my work I had, of course, come to know the white population. The Africans acted as my hunters, guides and carriers, for when you went into that forest you were transported back into the days of Stanley and Livingstone and all your worldly possessions had to be carried on the heads of a line of stalwart carriers.
Collecting wild animals is a full-time occupation and one does not have much time for the social graces, but it was curiously enough in this unlikely spot that I had the opportunity of helping what was then known as the Colonial Office.
I was busy one morning with the task of giving milk to five unweaned baby squirrels, none of whom, it appeared, had any brain or desire to live. At that time no feeding bottle with a small enough teat to fit the minute mouth of a baby squirrel had been invented, so the process was that you wrapped cotton wool round the end of a matchstick, dipped it into the milk mixture, and put it into their mouths for them to suck. This was a prolonged and extremely irritating job, for you had to be careful not to put too much milk on the cotton wool, otherwise they would choke, and you had to slip the cotton wool into their mouths sideways, otherwise it would catch on their teeth, whereupon they would promptly swallow it and die of an impacted bowel.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and already the heat was so intense that I had to keep wiping my hands on a towel so that I did not drench the baby squirrels with my sweat and thus give them a chill. I was not in the best of tempers but while I was trying to get some sustenance into my protégés (who were not collaborating), my steward, Pious, suddenly materialised at my side in the silent, unnerving way that Africans have.
‘Please, sah,’ he said.
‘Yes, whatee?’ I inquired irritably, trying to push some milk-drenched cotton wool into a squirrel’s mouth.
‘D.O. come, sah,’ he said.
‘The District Officer?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘What the hell does he want?’
‘No say, sah,’ said Pious impassively. ‘I go open beer?’
‘Well I suppose you’d better,’ I said, and as Martin Bugler, the District Officer, arrived at the crest of the hill I pushed the squirrels back into their nestbox full of dried banana leaves and went out of the marquee to greet him.
Martin was a tall, gangling young man with round, almost-black eyes and floppy black hair, a snub nose and a wide and very ingratiating grin. Owing to the length of his arms and legs and his habit of making wild gestures to illustrate when he talked, he was accident prone. But he was, however, a remarkably good D.O. for he loved his job intensely and, what is even more important, he loved the Africans equally intensely and they responded to this.
Now it has become fashionable to run down colonialism, District Officers and their assistants are made out to be monsters of iniquity. Of course there were bad ones but the majority of them were a wonderful set of men who did an exceedingly difficult job under the most trying conditions. Imagine, at the age of twenty-eight being put in charge of an area, say, the size of Wales, populated by an enormous number of Africans and with one assistant to help you. You had to look after their every need, you had to be mother and father to them, and you had to dispense the law. And in many cases the law, being English law, was of such complexity that it defeated even the devious brain of the indigenous population.
On many occasions, on my forays into the forest, I had passed the big mud-brick courtroom with its tin roof and seen Martin – the sweat pouring down him in torrents – trying some case or other, the whole thing being made even more complicated by the fact that villages, sometimes separated only by a few miles, spoke different dialects. Therefore, should there be dissension between two villages, it meant that you had to have two interpreters from the two villages and an interpreter who knew both dialects who could then interpret Martin. As in courts of law anywhere in the world, you knew perfectly well that everybody was lying the hind leg off a donkey, I had the greatest admiration for Martin’s patience and solemnity on these occasions. The cases could range from suspected cannibalism, via wife stealing, to simple things like whose cocoa-yam patch was invading whose, inch by subtle inch. On the many occasions that I had visited West Africa, I had only met one D.O. who was unpleasant.
I was very surprised at Martin’s appearance because, at that time in the morning, he should have been up to his eyes in office work. He came down the hillside almost at a run, gesticulating like a windmill and shouting things at me that I could not hear. I waited patiently until he reached the shade of the marquee.
‘So you see,’ he said, throwing out his arms in a gesture of despair, ‘I need help.’
I pushed a camp chair forward and pressed him gently into it.
‘Now stop carrying on like a mentally defective praying mantis,’ I said. ‘Just shut up for a minute and relax.’
He sat there mopping his brow with a sodden handkerchief.
‘Pious!’ I shouted.
‘Sah,’ replied Pious from the kitchen.
‘Pass beer for me and the D.O. please.’
‘Yes, sah.’
The beer was of a nauseating brand and not really cold because in our rather primitive base camp our only method of refrigeration was to keep the beer in buckets of water which was itself lukewarm. However, in climates like that where you perspire constantly – even when sitting immobile – you need a large liquid intake and for the daytime beer was the best.
Pious gravely poured the beer out into the glasses and Martin picked his up with a shaking hand and took a couple of frenzied gulps.
‘Now,’ I said, putting on my best soothing-psychiatrist voice, ‘do you mind repeating, slowly and clearly, what you were shouting as you came down the hill? And, by the way, you shouldn’t run about like that at this hour of the day, “A” it’s bad for your health and “B” it doesn’t do your public image any good. I thought you’d had a terrible uprising in Mamfe and that you were being pursued by vast quantities of Africans with spears and muzzle-loaders.’
Martin mopped his face and took another gulp of beer.
‘It’s worse than that,’ he said, ‘much, much worse.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘softly and calmly tell me what’s the matter.’
‘It’s the District Commissioner,’ he said.
‘Well, what’s the matter with him?’ I inquired. ‘Has he sacked you?’
‘That’s the point,’ said Martin, ‘he well might. That’s why I want help.’
‘I don’t see how I can help,’ I said, ‘I don’t know the District Commissioner or, as far as I am aware, any of his relatives, so I can’t put in a good word for you. Why, what heinous crime have you committed?’
‘I suppose I had better begin at the beginning,’ said Martin.
‘It’s always a good place to start,’ I said.
He mopped his face again, took another sustaining gulp of beer and glanced round furtively to make sure that we weren’t overheard.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you probably haven’t noticed; I’m quite good at my job, but unfortunately when it comes to entertaining and things like that I always seem to manage to do the wrong things. When I had just been promoted to D.O. – that was in Umfala – the first thing that happened was that the bloody D.C. came through on a tour of inspection. Well, everything went splendidly. I had my district in apple-pie order and it see
med as though the D.C. was rather pleased with me. He was only staying one night and by evening I really thought that the whole thing had been a success. But it was very unfortunate that the lavatory in my house had ceased to function and I couldn’t get it fixed in time so I had had a very comfortable grass shackbuiltwell away from the veranda, behind the hibiscus hedge. You know, a hole in the ground and a cross-pole on which you sit. Well, I explained this to the D.C. and it seemed that he quite understood. What I hadn’t realised was that my entire African staff were under the impression that I had built it for them and had been using it for several days before the D.C.’s arrival. Just before dinner the D.C. wandered out to the latrine and, apart from the contents which rather put him off, since he was under the impression that it had been done specially for him, he then sat on the cross-pole, which broke.’
It was my turn now to become slightly alarmed.
‘God in heaven,’ I said, startled, ‘didn’t you check the cross-pole?’
‘That’s the point,’ said Martin. ‘I’m so bad at that sort of thing.’
‘But you might have killed him or, worse still, drowned him,’ I said. ‘I know what our latrine’s like here and I certainly wouldn’t like to fall into it.’
‘I can assure you he didn’t enjoy the experience either,’ said Martin dismally. ‘He shouted for help of course and we got him out, but he looked like a sort of er . . . a sort of er . . . sort of walking dung heap. It took us hours to wash him down and get his clothes cleaned and pressed in time for his departure the following morning, and I can assure you, my dear boy, we sat down to a very late dinner and he ate very little and the conversation was frigid to an almost polar degree.’
Fillets of Plaice Page 10
