Owning Up: The Trilogy (56 page)

The Commander paused. A very slight smile hovered about his face. He suppressed it. Shaw, he said, was after all a famous writer. These chaps, and he gestured dismissively at the pamphlets, well he’d never even heard of them. That was an easy one. In that case Shaw was the more dangerous. A famous writer must surely carry more weight than the authors of ‘twopenny-halfpenny pamphlets’.

This was of course untrue and I knew it. Famous writers in general, and Shaw in particular, are licensed. For those seeking a voice to speak up for them, a prophet to translate their discontent into issues and actions, the eloquent unknown subversive carries far more weight than a famous jester of the Establishment. This happily didn’t occur to the Commander. He remained silent for some time. Then he gave judgement: I was an educated man. Much as he disapproved of them, it was possible for me to read and even benefit from such writings. The majority of the Lower Deck was not so privileged and might take everything literally. It could.be especially dangerous for those who had made the Navy their career. As I was due for demob in a few weeks, he had decided not to proceed with the charge. I daren’t look at Warrant Officer Perkins. Any sign from me of triumph or satisfaction might have driven him over the edge. The Commander continued: he was confiscating all my Anarchist literature. It would be returned to my home address after my demobilisation. He understood from Warrant Officer Perkins that I also subscribed to an Anarchist newspaper. I must cancel this or have it sent home. Anything to say?

‘Thank you, Sir.’

‘That’s all right, Melly, but any further infringement of my ruling and you’ll be on a very serious charge indeed. Case dismissed.’

‘About turn,’ shouted the Chief Petty Officer. ‘Quick march,’ and, into my ear: ‘Jammy bastard!’

I’d won! Warrant Officer Perkins had lost his last and most serious bid to undo me. I told Felix that I’d triumphed entirely through his advice and my own eloquence, and I believed it. It seems to me now that the fact the Commander quite liked me and was perfectly well aware that Warrant Officer Perkins had it in for me were equally valid reasons for his decision, and that the knowledge that I’d only a few weeks to go in the service and the sweat involved in setting up a court martial may well have come into it too.

Although I didn’t connect the two things at the time, I’m now convinced that my non-appearance at the Royal Naval Command variety performance two weeks later was the work of the Warrant Officer. The chaplain told me the powers that be had decided my act wasn’t suitable after all, and the other
Dido
entrant, a writer called Chinnery, a rather humdrum amateur conjuror of the ‘take a card’ school, appeared instead. I was upset but never for a moment thought that my defence of Anarchism had anything to do with disqualifying me from singing ‘Frankie and Johnny’ in front of the King.

Freed from the Commander’s ban on shore leave I went up to London a couple of times but found it less satisfactory and stimulating than during my distant days on the
Argus.
Many of the people I rang up were either away or engaged or said they were. I’d told most of them I was coming to live and work there after my demob and the prospect of being used as a convenient and regular source of food and drink by a penniless art gallery assistant was obviously less attractive than an occasional visit from a bellbottomed sailor.

The Mesens, of course, were a different matter, but here things were if anything less satisfactory. The gallery was almost ready to open: the coconut matting was down, the bookshelves installed and above the desk behind which I was to sit, a high relief sculpture by F E McWilliam of a vast displaced eye, ear, nose and mouth was already in position. What I found worrying was Edouard’s excessively businesslike approach. He dismissed my highly coloured version of my pro-Anarchist stand rather impatiently, concentrating almost entirely on my future duties – the till, the addressing of invitation cards, the telephone switchboard, the invoicing of accounts – and he told me that I must go to nightschool to learn French. He also let out that he had written to my parents suggesting that, after I’d left the Navy, I should return home for three months to master touch-typing and shorthand. Writing to my parents behind my back! Was this the act of a Surrealist poet?

The Surrealist Group had almost entirely disintegrated. Most of the foreigners had returned home and Simon, who had anyway quarrelled again with ELT, had joined BOAC as a steward. Sadi Cherkeshi had gone to train as a naval architect in Istanbul. I visited his ex-landlord, the gruff and humorous WS Meadmore of Margaretta Terrace SW3, and him at least I found totally unchanged. His wife still took lodgers and, although they were full at the moment, it occurred to me that, nearer the time of my coming to live in London, I might write and ask him if they would be prepared to take me on. Meadmore apart, I returned to Chatham wondering if I wouldn’t have preferred the life of a cub reporter on a Liverpool paper after all.

We left for Scotland which, like Guernsey, I resented as not being ‘really abroad’. After four days at sea we anchored at Rosyth. Felix and I went once to Edinburgh, a city with which I fell instantly in love. It was not so much the old town – despite its twisting, rather sinister medieval juxtaposition of squalor and grandeur and its association with Burke and Hare – which attracted me, nor yet the austere beauty of the Georgian new town. It was the rich absurdity of the Scottish Victoriana.

We dined in what was then called the Caledonian Snack Bar and is now the downstairs bar of the Café Royal but is otherwise mercifully unchanged. Behind the carved mahogany bar several magnificent stained-glass windows of sportsmen in the fashions of the 1870s: a cricketer with his beard and bat, a football player, a fisherman, a clean-shaven huntsman, a bewhiskered deer-stalker. The evening light, streaming through these worthies, cast lozenges of purple and red light on our lobster and schooners of sherry. On the walls were ceramic tiled murals of famous nineteenth-century inventors and scientists.

We steamed up to Nairn, a grey little town where it was drizzling, and Felix thought the moment had come to produce a bottle of schnapps he’d smuggled aboard at Frederikshavn. Edward had bought a little guidebook and, as the level of the schnapps went down, it drove us into increasingly manic hysterics. ‘Nairn folk,’ it read ‘look at you with kind eyes, schoolchildren smile and give you a cheery “hello” and babies in their prams wave fat little hands at you.’

The next day, the three of us walked to look at Cawdor Castle, an expedition that for some reason brought my insane and confused bouillabaisse of snobbery to the boil. ‘It has that indefinable feeling of history, of a line of sperm, of continuous possession which no public park or National Trust property can have,’ I told Felix. To ease my Anarchist conscience at these crypto-Fascist notions, I added that the only way to defeat ‘the aristocratic seduction’ was ‘a general aristocracy of the spirit’. ‘Man,’ I told him and Edward, ‘must possess the nobility of the lion, the grace of the antelope, the lust of the goat. It is no solution to tear down castles in order to erect grey housing estates or pessary factories.’

Acting on permission from the lodge-keeper, we wandered about the grounds and were rewarded by the sight of the seven-year-old young Laird playing with his nursemaid. ‘Fair-haired and sturdy’ was how I described him, and I was delighted when he waved to us from his nursery window as we were leaving.

On the walk back to Nairn, I launched into praise of the Pre-Raphaelites. Not of course ‘their deplorable religious works’, but their veneration for ‘the details of a hedgerow, the intricate veining of leaves, the furry underside of nettles, the berries, grasses and bright-eyed birds’. How Edward and Felix let me get away with it speaks more for their tolerance than my oratory – still less my ideology. I do remember thinking that Edward seemed ‘rather silent’ but put this down of course to his ‘dislike of walking’.

That evening in Nairn we went to the cinema to see that excellent American thriller
The Lady in The Lake,
but here too I couldn’t resist drawing conclusions afterwards. If the film was accurate, to fight in the defence of ‘the American way of life’ was absurd. Negroes, bums, outcasts, and rebels were the true heroes of the USA… Unlike my earlier eulogy for ‘the line of sperm’, it was at least a view which would have found favour in the decades to come, but it was just as glib, just as unconnected with any evaluation based on experience. Waiting on the jetty – the water still and milky, the sky primrose yellow, the ship twinkling half a mile out – I finally shut up. A Cornish Able Seaman we all knew slightly and who, sober, had struck us as a rather dour figure behind his formidable black beard, was trying to persuade his equally drunk friend that no good would come of his attempt to approach, with bestial intentions, a small white dog sitting under the marble statue of a Victorian divine holding a Bible.

‘Moi old lady,’ he said,’ ‘as gait six black cats. They be better for ‘un than thart gude darg!’

He kept it up in the liberty boat. After observing the
Dido’s
Medical Officer and Schoolmaster, who had been ashore together and were both very pissed, he concluded that ‘the Doc’s after the Schoolie’s arse, but the Schoolie’s so drunk and wet ‘e don’t know whart ‘e’s up to’. We could see no basis for this observation but found it amusing enough nevertheless. ‘Besoides,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘Doc’s so drunk ‘eself ‘e couldn’t roightly tell if oi ‘ad sif or crabs.’

We laughed a lot, while behind us the darkness obscured ‘the furry underside of nettles’ and ‘the bright-eyed birds’, and the reels of film proving ‘the absurdity of fighting for the American way of life’ lay stacked in the projection room of the Nairn Electric Kinema.

‘Who’ll give me his tot if I tell them where they can find a sheep and lend them my seaboots?’ It was the Baron who made this offer as he stared through the Porthole at Loch Ewe, a bleak stretch of water in the North-West Highlands surrounded by featureless hills on which, indeed, a few sheep grazed. Sheep-shagging in sparsely populated areas is a well-established naval myth and there was an apocryphal but much repeated story that at Scapa Flow during the war a rating accused of the practice told his Commander that he had mistaken the sheep for a WREN in a duffle coat.

We didn’t go ashore as the weather was foul and there was nothing to do except walk, but this didn’t stop me watching, with envious irritation, the First Lieutenant and the Ship’s Doctor setting off with their rods, and later feeling equally put out to find five or six freckled brown trout lying on a large white dish in the wardroom when I and the Marine Corporal were carrying out one of our raids on the wardroom galley during the middle watch. I had not fished since before the war, and was not to do so again until the middle Fifties but, like those diseases which lie dormant for several years only to break out with renewed vigour, I was still a fisherman waiting only for the opportunity to start again.

We had joined up with the
Superb,
the
Cleopatra,
the
Diadem
and the
Sirius
in order to paint ship for the royal inspection. The prospect was grim and, as always when boredom was unavoidable, frustration spread through the ship like a virus and tempers became frayed. Next day there was a fight. Our Mess Deck had just been painted prior to Admiral’s rounds when a Geordie sickberth attendant, who had been circulating round the ship claiming ‘sippers’ of rum to celebrate his birthday, staggered in. Now that rum is no longer issued in the Navy this could not happen but in those days it was the custom for any sailor who had a birthday to visit every mess claiming ‘sippers’ until such time as he collapsed. Admittedly this practice was officially forbidden ever since, according to legend, two popular identical twins, taking advantage of the tradition, were given so much that they both died of alcoholic poisoning, but it was still observed nevertheless. The Geordie was long past wanting any more rum anyway; he was simply on the way to his own mess to collapse, but he was so drunk that he pushed out of his path the duty cook who was dividing the currant duff. There were general cries of ‘fuck off, but the Baron varied the formula by adding ‘four eyes’ to his directive and, as the sickberth attendant wore very strong pebble glasses, this penetrated his fuddled consciousness, and breaking into great sobs of rage he shouted out: ‘Ah’ll rip your bludy throut out Baron’, and flew at him. The Baron behaved with (for him) remarkable restraint – ‘Well, I couldn’t go for a man half-canned’, he explained later – and the Geordie was pulled off him by members of both messes, but so great was his rum-fuelled rage that he broke loose and went for his opponent again and again. His shirt was in ribbons, his uniform covered in wet paint and dirt, his face filthy, tear-stained and horrifying in its impotent rage. I watched him with appalled fascination. Here was
I’homme tnoyen sensuel
with a vengeance! The climax came when, swinging round, he knocked a large tray of custard all over the newly painted hatch-combing. The Baron slid tactfully away and the boy, still shouting threats, allowed himself to be led off to his mess. When he came to several hours later he apologised to the Baron, who said: ‘That’s all right, mate.’ This allowed me to theorise at tedious length to Felix on the merits of instant violence (working class) as opposed to the vice of storing up resentment and listing scores to be settled (bourgeois). The fact was I had been disturbed by the fight and needed to rationalise it in order to find it acceptable.

While the painting was going on we had a small ship’s concert on board and Felix and I wrote a sketch for it full of cracks about the various officers. Edward, Felix, John the homosexual writer and I acted in it, and it went down very well. Later that evening, just as I was turning in, a wardroom steward came into the mess and asked me if we could do it again for the officers as they were giving a farewell dinner for the Captain and one of the Lieutenants, who’d been at the concert, thought it might amuse him. It was well if noisily received and we were given a lot of gin afterwards, although this time I was careful to avoid excess and got back to my hammock without delivering a revolutionary diatribe or being sick over anyone’s shoes. Next morning the ship, a smart grey from bow to stern, steamed slowly out of Loch Ewe, perhaps to the relief of the sheep, and headed south towards the Clyde.