Owning Up: The Trilogy (33 page)

Unaware of what this might lead to, despite a brother and a father currently in naval uniform, my notions of the Senior Service were still coloured by the Charles Laughton version of
Mutiny on
the Bounty;
I wept and continued to weep until, as I’d probably intended, my mother heard me and rattled the Bakelite handle of the bathroom door to ask me what was wrong.

Given that I was almost eighteen it may suggest a certain emotional immaturity to cry quite so desperately for so slight a cause, and the truth is that, while rather tiresomely sophisticated in some directions, I was extremely undeveloped in others and had, I would say now, an emotional age of about thirteen. Even if Major Clifford had carried out his threat it was extremely unlikely that a senior officer in command of the entire Royal Navy intake during a major conflict at a particularly crucial moment could have spared much time to work himself up over the loss of two items of archaic military equipment at a distant public school. Predictably, when I got to Skegness not a word was said about either belt or boot.

My choice of the Navy is also indicative of my thinking during that period. It had nothing to do with my younger brother’s success as a Dartmouth cadet nor my father’s shore-based commission in the RNVR. It was for no other reason than that I found the uniform ‘more amusing’.

Wearing plum-coloured corduroys and a pale pink shirt (school uniform had been suspended at Stowe during the war), I had explained this a month or two earlier to an outraged Admiral in Cambridge. I’d been sent to see him by the school in the hope that he might recommend me, like most of my contemporaries, for the year’s training while attached to a college. Enunciating with dangerous care, he told me he felt unable to do so. Otherwise I had a pleasant day. I took an actress from the local rep out to lunch –I’d met her through my mother when she’d been at the Liverpool Playhouse. I went to visit some pretty twins who painted identical whimsical pictures of cats in a studio flat in Petty Cury – I’d a letter of introduction from the couple who ran the Stowe art-school. Then I’d gone back and explained to J F Roxburgh, as sympathetic and ironic as ever, that the Admiral and I hadn’t really hit it off.

All in all then I was fairly confident that I would be wearing my ‘amusing’ uniform for as long as the Navy chose to keep me.

The journey to Skegness, a meander across wartime Britain involving a change of stations at Manchester, dragged on interminably. On the second leg I shared a carriage with a robust middle-aged Lancashire woman in a pixie-hood. She had two children with her, a baby and a toddler whom she used as props in a monologue aimed at demonstrating how rough yet warm-hearted were her maternal feelings. The baby was changed twice, with suitable comments on its copious stools. The little girl in her pink cardy understandably whined a great deal and was threatened or placated according to whim. At every stop – and there were many and all of uncertain duration – her mother, with the single-minded insistence of a radio comic launching a new catchphrase, yelled at her to ‘gerraway fra’ that door’.

I smiled at her occasionally in hypocritical if solicited endorse- ment. At the same time I neutralised much of my irritation by reminding myself that she was working class. My priggish if emo- tional left-wing sympathies, springing in the main in reaction to the Fascist sentiments of a hated prep-school headmaster, automatically awarded good marks for humble social origin. The fact was that I’d never met a member of the proletariat who wasn’t a nanny, tram conductor, plumber or school servant.

Neither was I in any position to criticise anyone for role-playing. The book I was reading, Corvo’s
Hadrian VII,
and the other books I’d brought with me were as much to advertise my tastes to anyone who might share them as for their literary content. And so we sat there as the Lincolnshire landscape grew flatter in the heat, she playing mum, me sensitive aesthete, until at last, at about five-thirty in the afternoon, the train pulled into Skegness Station. I found the pass the Navy had sent me, and drifted towards the exit.

Although turned down for Cambridge I was still what was known as a ‘Y scheme’ rating; that was someone who was at least to be considered for a commission; a categorisation based entirely on the fact that I’d been to a public school for, aside from my unfortunate brush with the Admiral, I’d no other contact with the Navy, taken no exam, attended no further interviews. Nor was there anything in my scholastic record to suggest a future officer. On the contrary I had managed to fail the elementary maths paper in my School Certificate and had made no attempt to take it again.

Even my having been accepted for the Navy at all was something of a privileged fiddle. Although entitled to state a preference, if you waited until you were called up you had no control over which of the services claimed you and at that time, just before D-Day, it was more than likely to have been the Army. If however you were still at school you could volunteer for whatever branch you wanted at seventeen, thereby ensuring acceptance. Simultaneously you entered a plea to be allowed to finish your education; a ploy which almost automatically deferred your service until the time you’d have been called up anyway.

That was how I found myself rattling toward HMS
Royal Arthur
in a small naval bus which had been waiting outside the station for the new intake. I looked out at the almost deserted resort, the pier peeling, the rock and souvenir shops shut for the duration. Despite my tears of a month before, I wasn’t in any way worried, simply curious.

What initially confused me about HMS
Royal Arthur
was the immediate sensation, later confirmed, of a certain architectural frivolity completely inappropriate to a Royal Navy Shore Establishment. The rows of huts, the great concrete messes, the straight paths – even the formal flower beds – were explicable enough, but it was possible to see that, under the khaki or grey paint of the exterior of the buildings, were traces of shocking pink or baby blue, while the interior of the communal structures proved even stranger. On arrival, still in our civvies, we were marched to ‘Collingwood Mess Block’ for a meal. We queued up in’a large lobby to draw our knives, forks and spoons through a hatch. The ceiling of the lobby was painted to represent a summer sky with fluffy white clouds passing across it. In the centre of the room, rooted in the bare floorboards, was a large and comparatively realistic tree. Part of the plaster from which it was constructed had fallen off to show a skeleton of wire-netting and metal scaffolding. The upper branches in no way tapered off, but terminated abruptly on contact with the painted sky. The serving hatch, through which a rather gloomy WREN Galley Rating passed us our eating irons, was framed by mullioned windows let into the elaborate façade of an Elizabethan inn with a sign reading ‘Ye Olde Pigge & Whistle’ projecting out over our heads. The dining hall itself made no effort to carry through this Merrie England ambience; it was an exercise in wholehearted if cut-price Odeon Art Deco. Our initial medical examination, on the other hand – ‘Have you ever had a venereal disease? Bend over. Cough’ – took place in a plaster-of-Paris cave embedded with papier mache skeletons and treasure-chests.

As I soon discovered, HMS
Royal Arthur
had been built for another function. It was one of the first of Billy Butlin’s holiday camps, all of which had been taken over by the Navy. Planned for the regimented pleasure of the Fairisle-jersied civilians of the late Thirties, they needed no more than a few coats of drab paint and a whaler on the swimming-bath to become wartime shore establishments. The redcoats were transformed into Petty Officers. The intercom system, through which the campers had been hi-de-hied to meals or jollied along to enter the knobbly knees competitions, now barked out our orders. The first morning, just to make quite sure we knew we were no longer subject to individual logic, we were made to get up at 0530 hrs. As a public schoolboy I was initially less thrown and unhappy than most of my working-class contemporaries. Being used to being away from home I was less homesick and, despite Stowe’s comparatively liberal approach to discipline, I found it that much easier to accept illogical orders. On the debit side, I was less able to cope for myself. I lost more, looked grubbier and more untidy, and found it impossible to lay out my bedding and equipment with the required Mondrian-like precision. Luckily, however, I was an instinctive and practised tart and most of the Petty Officers were, platonically at any rate, easily seducible.

Our Chief Petty Officer was a case in point. He looked rather like W C Fields and was quite old. Given his experience I suppose that he must have been near retiring age even by wartime standards or he would surely have been given a more taxing job than marching ninety young men around an intake camp. I fell for him because he combined a truly inventive obscenity with human sympathy: ‘You’re a fine specimen of hu-fucking-manity!’ were the first words he spoke to me directly; and because, despite my patent inadequacies and determination to become a licensed jester, he quite clearly liked me.

Throughout the three-and-a-half years I was to spend in the Navy I found that, in general, Petty Officers and Chief Petty Officers, if not religious maniacs or just nasty by nature, tended to be reasonable men. Long association with the sea and its ports had given them a certain tolerant sophistication, part cynical certainly but affectionately so. They had learnt to mistrust the moral imperatives of any one place because they had seen them replaced by others, often equally rigid and ridiculous, elsewhere. They made allowances too for us temporary sailors. We were there because we had to be. One day the war would be over and the Navy its old self – a machine for sailing in. The same attitude was common among regular ratings, especially those with long-service stripes. Many of them had been Petty Officers in fact but had been reduced to the ranks for some detected misdemeanour: habitual drunkenness, too open a penchant for young lads, jumping ship or failure of duty. They did, if very old, look a little absurd in bellbottoms but they were jolly fellows although in some cases a little pressing in their affections.

Warrant Officers on the other hand I could seldom abide. Martinets, sticklers for the letter of the law, hard resentful men who realised that they had risen from the ranks on merit but had been blocked for a commission on class grounds. Caught uneasily between the relaxed bonhomie of the POs’ mess and the easy formality of the wardroom they were punctilious in their insistence on outer form, correctitude, the marks of respect as laid down by King’s Regulations. In particular the presence of public schoolboys on the Lower Deck had a quite unsettling effect on them. Their perfectly understandable resentment at having to salute men much younger and less competent than themselves over the years tempted them to take it out on conscripts from the same social background as their ‘superiors’ yet, in fairness, their respect for the rules prevented them from yielding openly to the temptation to harass. It was just that if, as a middle-class rating, one erred, their reproaches or application of the primitive remedies available were delivered with a certain thin-lipped satisfaction not unlike that of a colour-prejudiced yet rigorously self-disciplined policeman happening upon an immigrant engaged in some provenly criminal act, or a moderate anti-Semite reading in a newspaper that a Jewish financier has been arrested for fraud. Retrospectively I can sympathise with those Warrant Officers but at the time, trapped myself in a web of confused class feelings, I teased them and yet resented it when they reacted as I’d intended.

With the Upper Deck it was easier. They behaved in general as if they were prefects and the middle-class conscript ratings were new boys. Occasionally, usually when slightly drunk on unaccustomed amounts of pink gin, some young sub-lieutenant would tell me, with an air of considerable condescension, that he’d known my brother at Dartmouth. There was also the odd officer, usually rather senior, who allowed himself to talk on a personal level to individual ratings. On the whole though contact with the Upper Deck remained minimal. Collectively we referred to them as ‘the pigs’ but, except in the case of a particularly officious or unpopular officer, the epithet was dismissive rather than venomous.

The only officer obliged to remain in contact with the Lower Deck on an approachable basis was in fact the Chaplain. It was he who organised any extra-maritime activities such as art shows or drama groups, and of course he was also responsible for our spiritual well-being. When I first joined the Navy I was still a vague believer in the existence of a personal God. After a great deal of hesitation, and considerably later than most boys at Stowe, I’d been confirmed, though I have a suspicion that my doubts and eventual decision to accept communion were largely based on attracting additional attention. I was aesthetically moved by the King James Bible and the
Book of Common Prayer.
I adored wallowing in the juicy harmonies of Victorian hymns, but the discovery that the Surrealists violently opposed Christianity had begun to shake my already pretty ramshackle faith, and the address to the new intake of ratings at
Royal Arthur
by the camp Chaplain did little to prop it up. ‘God,’ he told us in an insane parsonical bray, ‘is the Highest Officer in the British Navy.’

Our Chief Petty Officer was a sceptic. On Sunday mornings he told us: ‘You can crash your swedes until 0830 hrs, that is unless you wish to attend ’oly Commotion.’

Before our first Church Parade he told Roman Catholics to fall in at the front, and then asked if there were any Jews. There were two.

‘Well, we ’aven’t got no Rabbi,’ he said, ‘you’ll ‘ave to listen to the wireless,’ and they were dismissed and told to stay in their chalets until the Highest Officer in the British Navy had been suitably piped aboard.

We were meant to be at ‘Skeggy’ for a fortnight before going on to another camp near Ipswich for further training. During this period we were marched about endlessly. ‘Come on! Come on!’ yelled our Chief when we were tardy at falling in. ‘If you’d let go of yer cocks you’d get around a bloody sight quicker!’ We had our urine analysed several times and were shown a film about the effects of VD – ‘You’re off to the pictures now to learn how to whip it in, whip it out and wipe it!’ Due to the size of a screen designed for a full holiday-camp at the height of the season this proved a rather unnerving experience and several ratings fainted. I wasn’t among them, but I did become hysterical with suppressed laughter while watching a silent documentary on the correct way to brush your teeth. The enormous lips opened to reveal teeth the size of important Victorian tombstones while a huge brush moved slowly up and down them, and a little later a King-Kong-sized finger with a surprisingly dirty nail massaged the gigantic gums. We were looked at by psychiatrists to whom I swanked about my fondness for Eliot and Baroque architecture, but who all agreed with me instantly that I was sensible to favour the Lower Deck.