The Light's on at Signpost (32 page)

The choice lay between George Watson’s in Edinburgh, and Glasgow Academy, both prestigious public schools. Watson’s building looked new and energetic, but there was a trail of blood spots on one of its marbled corridors, and I voted for Glasgow Academy, which looked more used and familiar and informal, and the boys were a friendly, slightly raffish lot. I was to be a boarder, and I suspect my father was impressed by the boarding-house master, a bald and commanding ex-Indian Army officer, Captain John Colman Smith, with a cold eye and a parade-ground bark, usually of “What-what?” and “You silly young fool!”

“Coley” was a martinet, and as kind and decent a man as I have ever known. He and his wife ran the house of thirty boys (reduced to four in the first year of the war) fairly and strictly; it was an education you didn’t get at home; you made your own bed, polished your shoes, looked after your own clothes and effects, and learned to take care of yourself in a way which was to pay dividends later. Coley was in charge of the Academy’s games, coaching the rugby
team with fanatical energy, and it did me no harm that I was a competent full back and fast bowler, eventually winning my first team colours at rugby and cricket. But rugby was
the
game, played at a level unknown in Carlisle, and I thanked God I was a back and not a forward as I watched Coley training the heaving, straining pack, belabouring the crouched mass of bodies with his umbrella and bellowing “Get that bottom down!” He was also in charge of the school gymnasium, and during the war was employed by the BBC to keep the nation fit with early-morning broadcasts in which his stentorian commands ran through the length and breadth of the British Isles.

Coley was a great man of the old school, what used to be called an English gentleman, and ruled by personality alone; he never needed to use corporal punishment, which was common in the school itself.

Scholastically, Glasgow Academy was formidable. Its brightest boys won exhibitions and scholarships to the great universities, and for the rest it turned out aspiring doctors, lawyers, accountants, and businessmen for what was then one of the world’s great mercantile centres. Among its alumni were the playwrights J. M. Barrie and James Bridie; Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, and the musical comedy star, Jack Buchanan. Its teaching staff in my time was a curious mixture of Scots in the old, sound pedagogic tradition, and Englishmen, most of them young and enthusiastic sportsmen, from Oxford and Cambridge. They gave probably as good an education as was obtainable anywhere on earth, and if I continued on my placid way, first in English and nowhere in any other subject, it was not their fault. And one of them at least was a profound influence on my life, not by his teaching but by his unstinting encouragement: he was the man who convinced me that I was a writer.

His name was Walter Barradell-Smith, head of English, and himself a prolific author of school stories for boys under the name of
Richard Bird. He was small, sturdy, grizzled of hair and crimson of face, which earned him the nickname Beery, apparently irascible in speech and manner but invariably good-humoured and, to me at least, a priceless friend. Until I met him, I hadn’t thought of myself as a writer; indeed, I felt that English composition was something I wasn’t very good at. Beery never taught me to write; he never even said I might have a talent that way; he simply treated me as though I
was
already a writer at the age of thirteen, marking my essays extravagantly (it seemed to me) whatever the subject, whatever I wrote. Analysis and parsing I knew nothing about, and don’t try me even now; I was in my forties before I discovered what an adverb was. Beery didn’t seem to care; he simply returned my essays with eighteen or nineteen out of twenty every time, and when I ignored the subject he’d set for composition, and took off on some wild flight of my own, he would smile and nod and say nothing as he appended the inevitable high mark.

Gradually I came to accept that this was something I could do; after all, he was a professional judging by professional standards, so who was I to argue? When I was about sixteen, Coley summoned me to his study, smiling for once, and told me that he had heard Beery enthusing in the common room about some youngster who was going to make a name as a writer, and on inquiry discovered that he was talking about me. That impressed me, and I began to wonder about perhaps being an author some day—heaven knew I wasn’t educationally equipped to be anything else, and it was wartime anyway, and the Army would soon beckon, and writing or any other career would have to wait. Beery himself continued to say nothing, just marking me as highly as ever, and I would suggest to any teacher who thinks he has a budding writer on his hands, that he LEAVE HIM ALONE to write whatever he pleases the way he wants to write it. That was what Beery did with me, and however far short I may have fallen of the name he prophesied for me, it is thanks to him I’ve made a living doing what I like best.

One thing he did teach me, a love for Shakespeare. He took us through
Henry IV
, himself playing Falstaff with a gusto worthy of the Old Vic; then it was
Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth
, and the comedies, and by some magic he brought it all to life so that the classroom became the Globe and we the players, with himself the star. He even inspired me to take part in a school production of
Hamlet
, but I was demoted from Laertes to Francisco for losing my temper in rehearsing the duel and trying to kill the Prince of Denmark.

Strange, I can remember only one thing Beery said on the subject of writing: “Never say that someone is a bad writer. I once read
Tarzan of the Apes
, and thought it most appallingly written…until I thought, ‘No, this man has caught the imagination of untold millions with his words. How on earth can he be called a bad writer?’”

I left the Academy in the middle of the war, with no academic qualifications whatever, and only two prizes, for English and general knowledge—oh, and a cup for throwing the cricket ball. Whenever my eye falls on the general knowledge prize today (it was
The Savoy
Operas
), I’m reminded of a splendid contest once held in the United States to find the champion of sheer trivia and useless information, the winner being presented with a plastic bucket while the assembled competitors sang: “There he goes, think of all the crap he knows.” I wish I could have taken part.

My parents’ hopes that I would follow my father into medicine had long since dissolved in the face of my abysmal exam results, and Glasgow University wouldn’t look at me, to my profound relief, for I had only one thought, and that was to get into the war. The Army agreed, and presently I found myself 14687347, Private Fraser, G.M., in a draughty Nissen hut in the windswept grounds of a castle in County Durham, along with thirty other assorted conscripts, one-third of them gypsies and illiterate. We were taught to march and drill and shoot and stick bayonets into canvas dummies, all of
which I knew already, having been in the military cadet force known as the Officers’ Training Corps at school. It was assumed that if you’d been to a public school you would become an officer, and while that early martial training gave me an advantage, I’m not sure that what I’d learned as a school boarder about looking after myself and my effects, to say nothing of discipline and prompt obedience, wasn’t more valuable still. At least I wasn’t as bemused as my fellows in that strange, hostile environment of screaming instructors, iron routine, and mysterious rituals which seemed to have no point but to bewilder and dismay. I’d been there before.

But it was a strange new world just the same. When the North Country Englishman is disoriented he usually gets aggressive, and that barrack-room was no place for the faint-hearted; you could see the embryonic bullies, the keen types who welcomed the imposition of disciplined order, the patient plodders, the misfits and eccentrics, emerging in those first few weeks, and note the odd contrasts: the animal squalor and obscenity of some, the quiet acceptance of others, the hopeless terror of a few, and the bovine stolidity of the massive young farmhand in the bunk next to mine, who knelt to say his prayers every night. A few of the gypsies jeered, and one (nature imitating the art of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
) threw a boot at him, and had to be revived by his associates; the farmhand wasn’t as bovine as he looked.

Personally, I kept quiet, not acting too good nor talking too wise (thank you, Kipling), impatient to be done with a regime which had less to do with training than with what the Army called getting us “sorted out”. I resisted an attempt by the authorities to send me to the Signal Corps because I knew Morse; the infantry, and nothing but the infantry, was what I wanted, and with a real regiment. There were many irritants about primary training—being taught what I knew already; sleeping in coarse blankets (no sheets then) in my shirt, for while I had a pair of pyjamas in my kitbag, wearing them in that company would have been like passing port
to the right; getting a raw neck from damp chafing serge on rainswept parade grounds; having no nocturnal toilet facilities except a large iron bucket outside the hut in the icy darkness, but worst of all, having to wear the plastic badge of the General Service Corps which somehow made me feel only half a soldier, and a pretty scruffy one at that.

All that changed when I was posted to a young soldiers’ unit for potential officers at Derby. There we were all eager teenagers, the non-com instructors had been hand-picked, the training was far harder but considerably more advanced, standards of dress, drill, deportment and performance were immeasurably higher—and we knew that at the end of two months we would be sent to selection boards to see if we were fit for officer training. That was the Holy Grail—a commission, and being young and keen and ambitious we drilled and marched and shot and hurled ourselves over assault courses and hung on the lips of lecturers as though nothing else in life mattered—which it didn’t, then. We knew the Army was taking us seriously (and vice versa), and if ever we were in danger of forgetting it there was the awe-inspiring figure of Regimental Sergeant-Major Charlie Bradley of the Coldstream Guards to remind us. He was one of those legendary Guards RSMs, like Freddy Archer and Paddy Flynn, but even more celebrated, a tall, spare immaculate terror of a man with a piercing eye and a word of command that would have petrified Napoleon. The sight of him coming on parade, straight as a lance, pace-stick and peaked cap at the exact angle, crashing to a perfect halt, and sweeping the ranks with that dreadful glare (Gerald Kersh the novelist swore that Bradley could detect a missing trifle of equipment in a full battalion) was truly frightening; when that fearsome shriek of command struck your ear you could be in no doubt that you were in the Army now.

I met him at close range only once, as a trembling member of a guard being inspected, and it was a revelation. I knew I was as smart as several hours of frantic scrubbing and polishing could
make me, but when that cold eye was turned on me I knew real panic. Then he spoke, very softly: “Easy, lad. You’ll do,” and passed on his magisterial way. Not surprisingly, I have a high regard for RSM Charlie Bradley.

Three things could happen to you at a selection board—you could be passed, graded NY (“not yet”), or failed outright. I was one of the quarter or so who failed, and couldn’t believe it. In a book called
The General Danced at Dawn
, many years later, I have described the eccentricities of selection boards, whose decisions no man could fathom, but I think I failed because during one especially fatuous test, I muttered a contemptuous complaint. Or perhaps I just wasn’t good enough. Anyway, I was posted, nursing my wounded vanity, to the ranks of the 5th Battalion of the Border Regiment, was thrice promoted lance-corporal and thrice demoted, and eventually was sent to India, and into action in Burma with the Borders’ 9th Battalion.

Fighting the Japanese, frequently at close quarters, is an important experience. It was very primitive, old-fashioned warfare, but since I have recounted it in some detail in
Quartered Safe Out Here
, published nearly half a century later, I need say no more than that I learned much about soldiering and myself and about that matchless fighting man, the British infantryman, and his Indian and Gurkha comrades—yes, and the Japanese. And having led a section in action, I was not worried about going again before a selection board, which I passed this time, and found myself an officer cadet at the Officer Training School, Bangalore.

That, in its way, was just as influential as Burma. The British Raj was going down beneath the horizon, and the old Indian Army with it (for us, if not for the Indian cadets). But we saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India—the cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their
blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door, the vast, dusty parade where the young Winston Churchill had exercised his horse, the great cadets’ dining mess with the young Briton rising at the end of the table to propose “Mr Vice, the King!” and the stalwart Sikh rising at the other end to reply: “Gentlemen, the King-Emperor!” echoed by two hundred young men from the home country and all the warrior races of the sub-continent: Maharattas, Dogras, Sikhs, Afghans, Pathans, Gurkhas, Bengalis, and some from as far as Burma, Iran, and Nigeria. It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.

Not that I always thought so, for in memory it matches Burma and the two days’ stevedoring I once did in Port Said as the most physically gruelling experience of my life. Pampered brutes we may have seemed with bearers bringing tea and picking up our clothing where we dropped it, but we couldn’t have survived without them. The endless succession of parades, field exercises, lectures, marches, assault courses, physical training, and firing-range work, would have been impossible without their valeting; if you weren’t sweating across the plain you were being instructed in Urdu by patient
munshis
, or ploughing your way through tomes on Indian military law, or learning to ride a motorbike, or swinging on ropes or climbing walls, or prowling the night playing war games, or trying to stand still on a sun-baked parade—and somehow still managing to play three sets of tennis in the midday sun and a game of football in the evening before riding in a tonga (man-drawn rickshaw) into town to a restaurant or club or cinema—unless conscience intervened and you stayed in with your law books and Urdu grammars and military manuals while the big moths fluttered round the light and the lizards played on the white walls. For the thought of failure was never far away, and the prospect of being returned ignominiously to your unit. Indeed, you never felt safe until you paraded for the last time, with your second lieutenant’s stars beneath your
white cadet epaulettes, and marched off a cadet no longer but His Majesty’s trusted and well beloved friend.