Owning Up: The Trilogy (55 page)

Back aboard, before the summer cruise, there was an audition for a variety concert, one act from each ship, to be given that autumn in front of the King and Queen when they were inspecting the Home Fleet on the Clyde. Sacrificing republican feelings to show-biz I offered ‘Frankie and Johnny’ and was selected by the Chaplain of the
Duke of York,
the Val Parnell of the project, to represent the
Dido.
I was very pleased and wrote immediately to my mother to suggest she come up to Scotland for the occasion. Later I was told that I was not to appear after all, but this lay ahead, and it was in high spirits that we left Portland for a summer cruise, believed to be to Scandinavia, and my last few months in bellbottoms.

13

Disappointment awaited us. We were told that we were to visit not, as had been rumoured, Norway and Sweden, but Guernsey – and then return to Chatham. I was not at all thrilled about Guernsey, as it was too English to be thought of as being properly abroad. Nor was I forced to reconsider my prejudice on arrival. The island had been occupied by the Germans and there had been some accusations of fairly widespread collaboration. As a result there was a certain strident patriotism, a feeling that the war was only just over, and this manifested itself in thousands of Union jacks of all sizes, photographs of Churchill in most pubs and shop windows, and hundreds of posters showing a bulldog with a swastika between its teeth. The effect of this somewhat ostentatious Anglophilia was undermined by a small boy who approached us as we walked into St Peter Port and told us that he hated the British in general and British sailors in particular, a point he proceeded to amplify with a series of ineffectual but undoubtedly viciously-intended kicks and blows.

It was a Sunday and the pubs were officially shut, but we were told that there was one open on the other side of the island. We found a café serving eggs in any quantity (there was still a severe shortage on the mainland), and I ate eight at a sitting cooked in many different ways: boiled, fried, poached and scrambled. I was to pay for this later with an angry boil on my leg. Towards evening we caught a bus in search of the pub. Felix was worrying about his sex life, attributing his lack of success to his inability to distinguish between girls that might and those that wouldn’t. Whenever we passed one he would ask us crossly ‘Would she?’ or ‘What about her?’ Edward Wood and I answered with an assumption of libidinous expertise to which we had no right.

The island seemed dull, even on so beautiful an evening. It was flat and littered with greenhouses and, while there were many rather pretty Jersey cows, Felix told me – whether seriously or not I have never been able to decide – that they were ‘unfashionably light in colour’. We found the pub, a Thirties half-timbered building with those dispiriting horse-brasses in the saloon bar. It was quite lively however and half the ship’s company had homed in on it. After a time Felix went off, with the gloomy air of one who foresees failure, to try and pick up a girl ‘who might’, but Edward and I stayed put and began to get drunk. As usual the beer acted as a catalyst. There was a faded blonde at the bar asking, from time to time, for a gin and tonic in a painfully refined accent. I said something about the Palladium to Edward and she intervened.

‘Aye have sung there,’ she told us. ‘Aye have sung all over the West End in the old days. The Albert Hall, everywhere.’

She pointed to a variety bill for the local Palace that was pinned up behind the bar. At the bottom in very small letters it said ‘Grace Roberts – the Welsh Nightingale’.

‘The billing is all wrong,’ she said. ‘It is meant to include “of wireless, film, and television fame”.’

This last surprised me particularly. There had been a little television before the war in London; my father had seen it once and thought there was no future in it, but it had hardly got going again by 1947.

There was a curious noise like a bullfrog. We turned to face a tiny shrivelled man in spectacles who smiled at us, opened his mouth and croaked again even more loudly. I thought he was suffering from some affliction and tried not to smile but when he had croaked twice more I realised he was doing it deliberately. He too pointed to the variety bill and I worked out that he must be ‘Mimco – the Australian Mimic’. He treated us to quite a repertoire of imitations, but refused to perform his speciality – someone blowing up a bicycle tyre – on the grounds that it was too noisy.

Another figure, ‘the Great Marvo’, the top of the bill, executed several conjuring tricks. He had an enormous wart on the side of his nose, but his tricks were extremely boring. We fell into conversation with a separate group who turned out to be a rival concern, the local rep. They were rather pathetic and swanky and being unable to imitate bullfrogs or tell us what card we were holding, launched into elaborate dirty jokes involving a great many ‘funny voices’ and offered us free tickets to their next production,
jane Eyre
which, with that irritating habit actors have of shortening the names of plays (
eg
‘As You’, ‘Much’ or ‘The Dream’), they referred to as ‘Jane’. They did, however, give us a lift back in their taxi to St Peter Port where Edward, who had a weak head, was sick over the seafront.

The next day I had no shore leave but one of my nautical artistic duties to perform. Everywhere we went it was the custom of the
Dido
to hold a children’s party and it was my job to make-up the boy seamen as ‘pirates’, a task I enjoyed possibly overmuch. Later I was on cell duties. Taff had been recaptured for about the fourth time and put behind bars until there was a chance to hand him over to the naval police for yet another spell in the glasshouse. Despite the horrors to come, he seemed as cheerful as ever.

‘They’ll ’ave to dismiss me from the service sooner or later,’ he said in his Cardiff accent. ‘Stands to reason, Boyo.’

We were two days on the way to Chatham, the sea broken only by the ship’s bows. Gazing over the side at the steady stream of foaming water rushing past the great metal plating, it was possible to believe that it was the ship which was static, the ocean on the move. On the deck, in the hallucinatory clarity of the summer light, two marines, wearing masks, fenced among the stanchards and bollards. Smoking a cigar, contemplating a pleasurable shit, I was visited by the temptation to sign on, to travel the world, to know that whatsoever happened I would be clothed, housed and fed. I rejected it almost immediately: the discipline, the monotony of the Mess Deck, the ship lying, a dispossessed hulk of rusting metal, in the dockyard drizzle. Besides, I had to admit, the Navy might well refuse to have me. Useless at all but the most menial tasks, both rebellious and argumentive, I was more or less tolerated in the comparatively Anarchic gap between war and peace; and while on the subject of Anarchism, it would be impossible to square up my convictions with a career in the Navy. As an infiltrator or saboteur? Not me. Anarchism was too noble a concept to be denied in this way. Its means must be as honourable as its ends. I was an open Anarchist, making no secret of my commitment to anyone who was prepared to listen. In my locker were neat piles of pamphlets by Bakunin, Kropotkin, George Woodcock and Herbert Read which I left systematically about the Mess Deck hoping someone might pick them up and become interested. Somebody had. Warrant Officer Perkins had picked them up and become very interested indeed.

14

There was something afoot. The cancellation of the Scandinavian cruise, the unexpected return to Chatham, were more than jusran Admiralty whim. Rumour ran riot, but we were not kept in the dark for long. The morning following our arrival both watches, including watch-keepers, were ordered to fall in on the Quarter Deck – an unprecedented command in my experience. We were, the Commander told us, about to be addressed by the Captain, who had some very sad information to impart.

The Captain was a short, plump man, neither popular nor unpopular, and indeed seldom seen by anyone below decks except for the wardroom stewards and the ratings on the bridge. He told us first that he would shortly be leaving the ship, probably during the Scottish voyage, and that the Commander would be assuming temporary command. If this had been all he had to tell us, we would have felt that, in implying that it was enough to reduce the ship’s company to manly tears, the Commander had misinterpreted our feelings towards his rather anonymous superior officer. It was however only coincidental. The reason why the Captain was leaving the ship was because the Admiralty had decided – ‘Whether rightly or wrongly’, said the Captain in a rare display of feeling – that the
Dido
was for the scrapheap, redundant! This, he added, would not of course affect those due for demob, but he was sure it would be a matter of regret for the regular ship’s company, who would shortly have to return to their barracks for reposting. Meanwhile he hoped that the spirit of the ship…

Where he was wrong, in my case at any rate, was in believing that only the regular ship’s company would be upset. I am by nature sentimental to a fault, and it was all I could do not to sob audibly. It was ironic that the very next day I was to be put on a serious charge which could have given me cause to cry in earnest.

That evening, too short of funds and too despondent to go ‘up the Smoke’, Felix, Edward and I, all of us due for demob in a few weeks, got maudlin drunk, on the
Dido’s
behalf, in a gloomy Chatham pub. The beer was responsible for a minor disaster that night. In a dockyard they lock up the heads to avoid polluting the harbour and any rating taken short is expected to go ashore and use the latrines on the quay. Sensibly enough nobody does. An empty tickler tin is left by the open porthole, and is baled out into the darkness as many times as it is rilled. Rising crossly from my hammock I grabbed the tickler tin and began peeing in it, only to find that despite aiming accurately (a fact I checked) I was soaking my feet. In my fuddled state it took me some time to work out why. An empty tickler tin can be put to several uses, and one of them is for helping to make the washing-up water soapy. To do this all that’s necessary is to punch several holes in the bottom, put in some fragments of issue soap and then swish the tin rapidly around in the hot water until it produces sufficient lather. In my haste to relieve myself I had grabbed the wrong tin. Lying in my hammock with damp feet, I began to feel a little less sentimental about the
Dido.

The next day Warrant Officer Perkins approached me with a look of grim satisfaction on his face. I was to come up to the locker flat and open my locker. Why, I wondered? He surely couldn’t have persuaded the Commander that
Le Viol
was obscene after all. The Commander was waiting there looking rather severe. I smiled at him and he didn’t smile back,, but asked me to open it up. I did so. Warrant Officer Perkins pointed to the Freedom Press pamphlets. The Commander asked me what they were and why I had so many of each. I told him that they were Anarchist literature and whenever possible I distributed them among the sailors. A look of total astonishment passed across the Commander’s kindly aquiline features. Did I realise that these were subversive pamphlets aimed at undermining the State, the Armed Forces, the Church, even the Navy itself? I said yes of course I did, but…

There was no but. I was on Commander’s Defaulters next day and had better recognise the seriousness of the charge. If proven it could lead to a court martial. Shore leave suspended. Warrant Officer Perkins took the pamphlets, but I asked for an example of each to prepare my defence. The Commander nodded. I took them and went aloft, rather perplexed, to talk to Felix.

Felix was not perplexed at all. Anarchism opposed, both in general and in detail, the whole structure of society from the Head of State down. It was quite specific in declaring that its triumph could only be achieved through revolution. It dismissed all armed forces as the tools of the status quo and elective representation as a sham. I pointed out that so did Bernard Shaw, and yet there was a complete edition of his plays and prefaces in the ship’s library. A good point, Felix conceded, and his advice to me was to spend the evening marking suitable passages on such subjects as Royalty, God, the military, politicians and anything else relevant in support of my case. I did what he suggested and, before slinging my hammock, had found a selection of quotes which, taken out of context, made the Anarchist pamphlets sound understated.

Next day I faced the Commander. Perkins made a statement; finding a tract on the table in F Mess, reading it and discovering it to be not only subversive but, and here he coloured, an attack on God, the King and every other institution and standard that decent ordinary people held sacred… There was a great deal of feeling and passion in Warrant Officer Perkins. His animosity was not entirely personal. He genuinely loathed everything I subscribed to. The Commander asked me what I had to say. I began by asserting (here again Felix had advised me) that if the recent war stood for anything, it was to ensure freedom of thought and expression to all, including those holding minority views – even those which might appear repulsive to many people. The Commander made vaguely sympathetic noises to all this; Warrant Officer Perkins clearly dismissed it as immaterial. After a short pause the Commander became more specific, opening what he called ‘this twopenny-halfpenny subversive rubbish’ and asking me, as a member of the armed forces, to justify its dissemination. He then read out certain passages and I retaliated with one of my prepared quotes from Shaw. To begin with he asked if this was relevant. I assured him it was so, and he accepted it. Warrant Officer Perkins made it clear in his cold way that if he were sitting in judgement he’d have thrown the collected works of the Sage of Ayot St Lawrence into the harbour. After we’d covered Royalty, God, the family, universal suffrage, the profession of arms and kindred topics – the Commander reading from the Anarchists in measured tones, me trying to make Shaw sound as inflammatory as possible – he asked me what formed the basis of my quote-for-quote defence. I, in return, asked him if he found the passages from Shaw as subversive as those from Kropotkin, Woodcock and other libertarians. He admitted he did so. I then pointed out that I had borrowed the collected works of Shaw from the ship’s library, where they were freely available to the entire ship’s company.