Owning Up: The Trilogy (48 page)

By mid-morning stand easy things had become more bearable. I had already scurried about the ship bearing messages on behalf of the Officers of the Watch, making frequent detours to chat with an increasing circle of friends or acquaintances. On my own Mess Deck I “had come to know the rating whom I’d heard describing his erotic games in the cinema, and a genuine if occasionally frightening original he’d turned out to be. He was called ‘the Baron’ and came originally from Leicester. His title sprang from his sparing use of the word ‘baronial’ as an adjective of high praise. Returning on board, he would quite often produce some ‘liberated’ object from under his mac or greatcoat and offer it for sale.

‘Who,’ he’d enquire, ‘wants to buy this baronial coffee pot?’

On the other hand, anything he disliked, and that included almost everything connected with the Navy, he described as ‘Mongolian’. The Officers, the Petty Officers, the food, the Mess Deck, the ship itself, were all decidedly Mongolian. This was predictable, but less so was the catalogue of what the Baron considered to be baronial. ‘Big eats,’ the naval expression for a large meal ashore, usually a steak with an egg on it and a mountain of chips, was to be expected. Grog likewise, and sex, especially in its more bizarre manifestations (it was the Baron who introduced me to the expression ‘a yodel in the canyon’ to describe the practice of going down on a woman). But in other directions his tastes were more individual. He read a great deal, mostly the English classics, and had a good eye; the baronial coffee pots and other objects he offered for sale were never ugly, and abroad he refused to buy any of the trashy souvenirs which most sailors staggered home with as presents for ‘my party’ or ‘the old lady’. It was however music that especially possessed him, more specifically grand opera and (most baronial of all) Johann Sebastian Bach, a composer he admired so much as to insist on calling him by his full name at all times.

When years later I read
A Clockwork Orange,
the anti-hero, with his passion for ‘Ludwig Van’, immediately reminded me of the Baron, and when the film came out and people said they couldn’t believe that someone so in love with violence, so coldly psychopathic, could also adore classical music, I was able to contradict them, because the Baron was at times very dangerous indeed. Personally I only experienced this once, when some remark I made in the showers offended him, and he threw a bucket of near-boiling water over my feet, but ashore he was constantly and consciously involved in fights. I knew him to carry a knife, and there were times when his face, for all its cherubic innocence, turned very ugly indeed and I was aware that, behind thechina blue eyes, a wild beast was insecurely caged.

The Baron was feared on the Mess Deck. Coming aboard, dangerously drunk, he would pull out his gramophone and play an aria or a prelude and fugue and, even at three in the morning, no one dared to object. Once someone was injudicious enough to suggest, very unaggressively, that he turn it in. The Baron produced his knife and very slowly and carefully sawed through the seaman’s hammock rope. There was a crash and a surprised oath as the unfortunate man bounced off the mess table on to the deck, but he knew better than to protest. Putting away his knife, the Baron continued to listen with rapt attention to the divine mathematics of Johann Sebastian.

The boiling water apart, the Baron was in general my champion, although at times this was something of an embarrassment. Almost my first day on the Mess Deck, I was studying, with a certain defiant ostentation, a new book on Picasso and arousing in consequence considerable scorn among my mess-mates. I quite welcomed this as it gave me a chance to lecture them, to try and make them see why there was nothing absurd in the artist’s distortions, but before I could launch into it, the Baron grabbed my principal mocker by the collar.

‘Anyone who says a word against fucking Picasso,’ he murmured gently, ‘gets fucking done over. Have you got that, shirt?’ The shirt in question admitted he had (the Baron called everybody ‘shirt’ or ‘horse’ regardless of sex or status). From then on nobody on C Deck ever murmured a criticism of the Spanish painter.

Nor was the Baron’s protection confined to aboard ship. In a pub in Portsmouth one night I was declaiming and no doubt misquoting Shakespeare when the fat old landlady decided she’d had enough. Looming suddenly over me she told me to get out. The Baron rose from another table and tapped her on the shoulder. She spun round to face his calm yet dangerous regard. ‘He can stay, horse,’ he told her with mild menace, ‘and he can recite baronial Shakespeare,’ he continued, ‘and if you say another fucking word against it, I’ll thump you right between your Mongolian fucking tits.’ He sat down again and the old woman retired hurriedly back behind the protection of the bar.

Yet despite or indeed because of the Baron’s determination to protect me against slight or insult, I usually avoided going ashore with him. This didn’t actually offend him. A night without a brawl seemed to him incomplete, but he knew I in no way shared this view and, if I had been dragged in by accident, I might well have got seriously hurt. Nor was I any help in his sexual forays as, with my rather obvious effeminacy, I could easily give the rather tough women he favoured the wrong impression as to his own inclinations; for, despite complete sexual tolerance, the Baron was entirely heterosexual. If we met ashore by chance, and he was not yet too drunk, we’d greet each other affectionately. If I realised he was far gone I would do my best to avoid him. Any contact with the Baron was potentially dangerous, but his originality, his wit, his edge, made it a price – within limits – I was prepared to accept.

‘You realise, of course, that if what you claim to have done was true, and what you assert you would like to do was meant, it would be impossible for us to remain friends or even acquaintances.’

The speaker was an enormous young man over six feet tall. He had a nose like the Duke of Wellington, a deep voice betrayed when amused by a surprisingly high-pitched giggle, and that serious and civilised approach to life, marred only by a certain pomposity, which is characteristic of those educated at Winchester. His name was Gerald Aylmer, his nickname ‘Felix’, after the celebrated actor of the time Felix Aylmer, and this prefect-like explosion was provoked by overhearing in the showers a discussion between an elderly Leading Seaman and myself as to the physical beauty of a boy-rating who had just joined the ship and whose skin, as the killick put it, was ‘as smooth as a tombola ticket or a wardroom plate’.

I told Felix that what I said I’d done was true, and what I said I’d like to do was equally accurate if, alas, not necessarily feasible, and that he was not a ship’s prefect or responsible for house spirit on board the
Dido.
Suddenly he laughed and agreed that my sexual tastes were indeed no concern of his, and would I like to go ashore with him that night? So we did, and got roaring drunk and became the best of friends.

Felix was a remarkable man. His father was a retired Admiral living, as I was to discover, in a village near Weymouth and, as Felix was extremely clever, he could certainly have obtained a commission. I was sometimes puzzled as to why he should have chosen to remain a rating (he was in charge of the ship’s charts) but eventually came to the conclusion it was because he was a convinced Socialist. There was a kind of dogged nobility about him, an admirable probity which made me feel flimsy and frivolous, but in fact, once he had recognised and rejected the sixth-form prudery which had sparked off his outburst in the washroom, he revealed a love of gossip, a delight in alcoholic excess, and a shared enthusiasm for many modern authors, in particular W H Auden, which quickly reassured me.

The chart-room was high up in the ship, conveniently near the bridge, and Felix, when we were in harbour, was allowed to sleep in it and use it as a kind of study. As our friendship ripened I was invited frequently to visit him there, sometimes with Tom or other friends, sometimes alone. It proved a blessed retreat from the hurly-burly of the Mess Deck.

Felix was committed to the recently elected Labour Government, and would argue with me frequently as to the need for reformist and gradual political re-education, for the virtues of austerity and control, of the undoubtedly boring but entirely necessary work of committees and sub-committees engaged in such work as the implementation of Lord Beveridge’s recommendations for a National Health Service. He viewed my Anarcho–Surrealism as an amusing aberration. He had read History and drawn his con clusions. Nevertheless, he was not uncritical of the Government when he felt them to be at fault and one morning, delivering a message to the chart-room, I found him, the colour of a turkey cock, growling over a copy of the
Daily Mirror,
a paper he had hitherto championed for helping persuade the electorate to reject, Churchill. The reason for his anger was an article supporting Ernie Bevin’s blockading of Palestine and the harassment of the Jewish refugees. This appalled Felix on grounds of both reason and sentiment. I told him that actually I knew little of the rights or wrongs of the question, feeling only that, after the horrors of the death camps, my mother’s race was surely entitled to every consideration.

That evening Felix, the prototype WASP, lectured Tom and myself on the history of Zionism, and in particular on our moral need to honour the Balfour Agreement whatever the political inconvenience in doing so. He spoke well and eloquently (he was later to become a history don), and the upshot was that we all three solemnly undertook to refuse orders, if sent to the Mediterranean, to prevent refugees from reaching their promised land and, more immediately, to write a letter of protest to the
Daily Mirror.
Our first undertaking was luckily never to be put to the test although I hope and believe we would all three have honoured it. The letter, however, was both written and dispatched. Servicemen were not of course allowed to communicate with the press, but we asked the editor to inform his readers that we had supplied him with our names and ship. This was an unnecessary precaution as the letter itself, written mostly by Felix, closely argued and of great length, remained inevitably unpublished. It might have appeared in print in
The Times, Guardian
or
Telegraph,
but there was no possibility that the popularist
Daily Mirror
could have seen its way to use up its still-rationed space on so weighty a reproach. Felix, however, felt the better for writing it.

Tom and Felix got on moderately-well. Both were keen on chess and would play together up in the chart-room while I – whose mind has always found it difficult to remember the moves, let alone plan strategy – read or wrote. They were never close however. Something abrasive in Tom, probably his resistance to the middle classes, forced him to try Felix’s patience whenever things seemed smooth or pleasant. My patience too. There were times I hated Tom. Nevertheless it was with him I went down into the cable-locker flat to play our records. For one thing, Felix was not very interested in jazz, and here at least Tom and I could forget our differences, and sit listening to Jelly Roll, Louis, King Oliver, Bessie, Muggsy, Sidney Bechet on the wind-up gramophone among the great coils of the anchor chains.

‘I ain’t here to try and save your soul,’ moaned Bessie in ecstatic glee, ‘I’m only here to try and save your good jelly roll.’

The difference between proletarian Dalston and middle-class Liverpool was temporarily erased. The joyful hedonism of the stomps and marches, the catharsis of the blues were all that mattered.

Yet whereas my theoretical admiration for the working class was frequently and provokingly stretched to breaking point by Tom, my third great friend on the
Dido
sprang from exactly that area which I somehow felt it was all right to despise – the
petit bourgeoisie.

Edward Wood came from Amos Grove. His parents lived in a semi and his father worked in a bank. He too had done so before being called up and was to return after his demob, but he blew every theory I held about the sterility of the lower-middle classes sky high, or at least he would have done had I found it possible at that age to compare my theoretical stances with my feelings and experience. Edward was funny, mildly subversive, freshly good-looking, completely heterosexual and almost unfairly charming. It’s difficult to describe Edward’s golden charm. It was just that he emanated what the hippies, still at the time in their wombs or prams, were to call ‘good vibes’.

These then were my friends, with the Baron as a kind of unreliable third option and the ship’s writer, a Bambi-eyed South London gay, as a confidant and sometimes lover when I reilly needed to let my hair down. There were others I was fond of, particularly a Welshman called – without, I’ll agree, any startling originality – Taff, but as Taff was a constant deserter and in consequence either in the ship’s cell waiting to be court-martialled or else doing time in the glasshouse, our friendship had little time to mature.

My relationship with the Petty Officers and Chief Petty Officers was, as usual, cordial, if flirtatious. When in harbour, for they would in no way trust me to steer the ship, I became temporary Quartermaster, a watch-keeper’s job involving little more than making announcements through the Tannoy (‘I wish you wouldn’t say “wakey, wakey” so fuckin’ womanish,’ complained one grizzled Petty Officer. ‘It’s fuckin’ embarrassin’ getting up wiv an ‘ard on’). As for the officers I found them quite difficult to deal with because they were structured to think of ratings as working class, and swung between a somewhat awkward and patronising acknowledgement that I was not when they were drunk, and a prefect-like severity when faced by my failings as a seaman.

The Captain was a harmless, rather short man with whom I had little contact, but the Commander – a tall, introspective figure -took, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, a paternal interest in me, and did all he could to make my life agreeable. He was also responsible, on several occasions, for rescuing me when I could have found myself in some trouble. Both times my peril was due to the machinations of my one serious and implacable enemy on the
Dido –
inevitably, it would seem in my case, a Warrant Officer.