by Simon Raven
I think it was this last sentence that really did it – possibly just the last word of all, so quiet and so clear, so evident and total a repudiation of Spotty Duvell…who now completely lost his self-control.
‘Why didn’t you tell me at once,’ he yowled, and snatched at the list. ‘You fucking, stinking, slimy little cunt, you – you and your shit-eating nancy friends.’
There was a very long silence. Play ceased as all the players turned to gaze in our direction. Syd Tasker shifted from heel to toe and licked his upper lip. Spotty’s face wobbled and then fell apart.
‘I…I…’ he mouthed.
‘As a man of your experience must be aware,’ said James, ‘you are forbidden to address any soldier in this fashion. If sworn at with good will and good humour, the rank and file will tolerate and welcome a little rough language. If insulted, indeed slandered, in obscene and malevolent terms, they will not. I have only to report this disgraceful exhibition to the Commandant, supported as I shall be by these witnesses, for you to be deprived of your Cadetship and almost certainly degraded to private rank. However, gentlemen,’ said James to the rest of us, ‘I think we know how to make allowances. You, Sandy, and you, Barry: you’re batting well down in the tail. Just accompany the Sergeant-Major to the latrines, would you, please, and be sure he makes a good job of them.’
‘Well,’ I said later, ‘why didn’t you tell him at once? About that note? You were leading him on.’
‘Oh no. I just wanted to give him a chance to show us his better side.’
‘Would they really have degraded him if we’d reported the incident?’
‘I doubt it. He believed it, because at bottom he is the sort of underdog who believes anything which he is firmly told by his betters. My own view is that he might well have got off with a severe reprimand. Still, it certainly wouldn’t have done his career any good. I think he was wise to accept the proferred bargain.’
The next day, Sergeant-Major Spotty Duvell dismissed his jackel and arranged with the Officer i/c Draught for James to be made up as a Local, Acting, Unpaid (O/Cadet) Colour-Sergeant. From now on James was to be Spotty’s constant aide. Clearly Spotty, though not an initiator, was an opportunist and a philosopher; he would make (James reported as the days went on) a far better Officer than we had thought.
Certainly, he never forgot himself again.
‘You taught me a thing, you did,’ he said to James one night when mildly in drink, ‘you taught me there’s nothing like Class, and if a man hasn’t got it he better borrow a bit. That’s what you are, Jimmy boy – my bit o’ borrowed Class.’
Although the OTS at Bangalore had been founded to train mature and experienced civilian volunteers, and was therefore adult in its attitudes and sparing of regulation, the authorities were aware by now that the Cadets coming into their care were far younger and more vulnerable than they had been in the early forties. The Commandant had therefore decreed that, while the traditional tolerance of the institution should not be renounced, the Cadets must nevertheless have as many amusements as possible ‘laid on’ for them during their leisure, in order to distract them from the perils of the town. One such entertainment was an educational visit, scheduled to extend over a whole long weekend, to the Gold Fields at Kola. James and I and Sandy and Barry (two Greenjacket chums of James who were wary of me but not unfriendly) were all going, not for the technical enlightenments on offer, but to take part in a Gala Two Day Cricket Match.
‘I want no snobbiness from any of you,’ James said as we set off in an OTS bus. ‘Some of the chaps there will be absolute oiks, of course, the sort of people you’d expect to be mixed up in gold digging, but we must remember that we are the ambassadors of the OTS and the Army, and we must do our best to strike up cordial relations.’
‘Yes, James,’ we all said.
It was early in the evening when we arrived at Kola, where a crowd of white employees was waiting by the central offices to greet us all and escort us to the various houses in which we should be entertained. As luck would have it, I was separated from James, Sandy and Barry, who were swept away by a stubby and overbearing manager of senior aspect. Meanwhile, I was taken on by a modest and brittle young man, who led me off to his bachelor bungalow and filled me up with gin, curry and whisky, in that order, as a preface to telling me about his life.
This had been somewhat less than satisfactory: his father and mother had drunk the money left by his grandfather specifically to provide him with a decent education, and had then resented and bullied him when he succeeded in winning for himself scholarships just sufficient to put him through a grammar school and Sheffield University. His father accused him of being a parasite on the household and his mother called him a traitor to his country (his call-up had been deferred as he was studying Metallurgy), and the only girlfriend he ever had used to arrive in his lodgings at Sheffield shortly after breakfast every morning and stay with him there or follow him wherever he went until eleven o’clock at night, talking incessantly of the ‘home’ they would have as soon as he had the sense to leave the University and get a ‘proper, paying job’. In order to be rid of her he had to feign three epileptic fits, during the last of which he had banged his head so hard on the fender that he went to his final examination in a state of shock. What with that, and what with having had his work constantly disrupted for the last three months by the alternate quacking and whingeing of the girlfriend, it was, he told me, hardly surprising that he managed to obtain only a Pass Degree.
However, Metallurgists were in short supply, and when the Army had absolutely turned him down for service (advanced and ubiquitous nervous eczema, first aroused by the attentions of his girlfriend and later long nourished by her memory) he was accepted for overseas employment here at Kola. So in the end things hadn’t turned out too badly, you might say. He was quite liberally paid (in order that he might keep up his end as a white man), he had two native servants (to the great envy of his mother and the fury of his father), and a cosy little place of his own (and cosy it was) to drink his whisky in peace and quiet. What, I enquired, did he actually do in exchange for these privileges? Well – er – well, he was in the Security Department. A trained Metallurgist…in the Security Department? Yes: you see, they needed an expert to recognise the presence of gold dust in the clothes or on the persons of native workers who tried to smuggle it out of the compound. He looked at me heavily, took a long swig of whisky, laughed out loud, and, ‘After all that solemn grind at Sheffield,’ he said, ‘I now spend my entire professional life looking up black arseholes and under black foreskins – some people’s idea of heaven, I suppose.’
He was, in fact, a pretty good sort of man who had no illusions about his own dinginess and absurdity. I often wonder what happened to him when Independence came to the Kola Gold concern, and I rather fear for the worst.
As soon as I arrived with him next morning at the cricket ground, I was taken on one side by Sandy.
‘Something awful has come over James,’ Sandy giggled, passing his fingers rapidly in and out of his short blond hair and exhibiting a positive sheen of pleasurable excitement on his fourth form face, ‘he’s taken against the Mem.’
‘Taken against the what?’
‘The wife of that man who’s putting us up. He calls her ‘The Mem’, or ‘Mem’ in the vocative. Apparently she’s the ‘doyenne’ – that’s the word he uses – of all the Kola wives. She snooted us up last night because we’re Greenjackets. She pretends to think that the Fusiliers are much smarter – her father was one. James is very put out.’
‘Surely he won’t rise to that bait? After all his talk about our being ambassadors. She’s just the sort of person we’ve got to be nice to.’
‘I know. But when you get a look at her you’ll see why we’re finding it difficult. There,’ said Sandy, and pointed.
A sort of giant upright pug dog, on two legs like barrels, was dismounting from a tonga. It carried a parasol and was supported by two native bearers. A
n enormous strawhat, smothered in botanical decoration, crowned and sheltered it; the massive, white-stockinged legs, jammed into white brogues, somehow, incredibly, propelled it; a kind of shrill drawl announced its arrival, in a series of prolonged hoots.
‘Can’t…you seaah…I’m heaaah,’ it said, ‘jildah, jildah, cheah…bairaah.’ (Can’t you see I’m here. Jilde, jilde (quick, quick), chair, bearer.)
‘I do see,’ I said. ‘Has there been a row yet?’
‘No. Though there nearly was when she called the Rifle Brigade a “Parvenu Regiment”.’
‘So it is.’
‘I know. But James says a woman like that can’t be allowed to say so and get away with it. He’s planning what he calls a “Heffalump Trap”.’
I remembered the technique from nursery readings of Winnie the Pooh. In order to trap a Heffalump, one arranged a piece of ground to look particularly pretty and well kept, and so particularly tempting to an ill-conditioned Heffalump to trample on. And when it did, it went crashing through into the trap beneath, where it was left bellowing furiously until at last it quietened down and promised to mend its manners.
‘From the look of her,’ I said, ‘he’ll have to get up quite early in the morning to construct it.’
‘It seems that her husband is Captain of their cricket team. James is working on that.’
‘But he’s about a hundred years old.’
‘That’s what James said. “No fool like an old fool”,’ he said, ‘“we should be able to fix something.”’
‘But what’s got into James? He knows he mustn’t tamper with elderly managers – however disagreeable their wives may be.’
‘I thought I’d tell you,’ said Sandy, jittering with expectation, ‘because you’ve known him longer than any of us, and you might be able to do something to stop him. Though I don’t think you will be,’ he added happily.
As I walked across the ground towards the Pavilion my host (Ted) rejoined me.
‘You’ll find our lot’s a sporting team,’ Ted said, ‘but tough. They remind me of some of the Sheffield League sides I used to watch. The only trouble is our Captain. He is fascinated by the personality and practice of W G Grace. He thinks that he’s W G reborn.’
‘A fairly harmless delusion?’
‘But don’t you remember? W G was a marvellous cricketer, but he was also omniscient, arrogant, and over-fond of refreshment at lunchtime…all of which turned him into a bully and even a cheat.’
‘Ah.’
‘Kola Bert – that’s what we call our skipper – Kola Bert reincarnates the very worst of W G. But no one can do anything because he’s so senior. And as for his Mem…’
Ted shuddered.
As I passed this lady on the way into the Pavilion (with some difficulty as she was parked slap in the doorway) four bearers appeared with cold drinks, pots of tea, plates of cakes etc, and set them up on a series of tables which substantially increased the obstacle to entrance. Her husband now came up (wearing an Old Carthusian blazer) and diffidently recommended a slight shift of her apparatus, but was told ‘not to be a bloodah fool, Bertah, Ah’ve onlah just got comfah.’ He departed with a muffled snort, clearly about to take this defeat out on someone else, while I hurried on to the Visitors’ Dressing Room.
‘He’s wearing an OC blazer,’ I said to James, who was putting on the specially thick white socks that were knitted for him by his mother.
‘Who is?’
‘Bertah – the chap you’re staying with. He’s wearing an OC blazer with thick stripes – like a wop ice cream.’
‘Is he?’ said James dangerously.
‘James…what has he done to you?’
‘It’s his wife. Great rorting carnivore. But he’s as bad. OC blazer indeed. There’s no such thing. Bob Arrowsmith once told me.’
‘But I tell you he’s wearing it.’
‘Then he’s had it made up. As bad as wearing a made-up evening tie. Worse.’
‘Ted, my host, says he thinks he’s W G Grace. And cheats to prove it.’
‘Come over here, please, Barry,’ said James to sinuous, sinewy Barry Tooman, our first spin bowler.
Barry came.
‘Now listen carefully,’ James began.
The first day’s play in the Kola Match was pretty dull, but left the possibility of an interesting finish. Giles Peregrine, our Captain, had won the toss, put us in to bat, and declared at teatime at 372 for 6, an average opening score for the ground, which was very small and very fast (whence the dullness of the play, which was apt to be a monotonous succession of easy boundaries). The Kola XI had reached 180 for 3 in reply when stumps were drawn for the day. On the form they were showing, they would probably bat on to equal our score by about lunchtime the next day, thus leaving the afternoon to settle the issue.
At close of play on the second day, there would be a quick buffet, after which we Cadets must leave at once for Bangalore. On the evening of the first day, just concluded, there was to be a Gala Dinner for both teams, we had been told, in the Boardroom of the Company. Men only. Thus it seemed unlikely that James would again encounter the Mem in any substantial fashion, and I was hoping that absence, making his heart grow fonder or at least less loathing, might lead to his abandoning his scheme for the humiliation of her husband the next day.
This consisted in getting Barry Tooman, with Giles Peregrine’s connivance, to bowl very high donkey drops, which would descend almost vertically on the old man and show up his incapacity in shame-making slow motion. It was, on the face of it, a harmless enough idea, but it seemed to me that it could lead to just the sort of ill feeling which James himself had told us must in no case be conjured, and it also seemed that this whole business was somehow unworthy. Why did James have to bother himself about this dismal couple in the first place? True, the Mem was about the most appalling example of her species ever put on view, but Kola Bert was just ageing and pompous, nothing worse, and in any event at all they would both vanish from our lives for good and all at dusk tomorrow. It did not seem to me that her mild (and accurate) jibe at the Rifle Brigade and his donning of a vulgar and unauthorised blazer need give rise to vengeful stratagems. So at least Sandy and I were telling James as we walked up the steps of the building (Graeco-Buddhist) which contained the Boardroom, and so, I was happy to observe, he now seemed to be thinking for himself.
‘Right you be,’ he said, ‘I was just being childish.’
Then we entered the Anteroom. The first thing we saw was the Mem. Enthroned amid a crowd of Kola cricketing sycophants and wielding a Tom Collins like a sceptre, she gazed down with sumptuous disdain on all which and whom she beheld, ourselves among them.
‘What is that fucking woman doing here?’ muttered James. ‘A men’s dinner, they said.’
‘She,’ I hazarded, ‘is bound to be the exception…the one who may not be excluded, the one to whom the Laws do not apply, just as the Queen of England, alone among women, may enter the Pavilion at Lord’s.’
‘That could be it,’ said James. ‘The Head Bitch.’
Clearly he was outraged and even rather frightened by the Mem’s appearance at this masculine function. So was I. Who knew what vile processes of bullying, nagging or blackmail she had deployed to get herself there? We were also outraged by the behaviour of the husband. He surely was in a position to stop her. If he had not done so, it meant either that he was downright feeble (in this area at least) or that he enjoyed according such lone privilege to his wife and so by extension to himself. Either way he must be punished: the plan for tomorrow would now, after all, go forward as it had been conceived; and it was greatly hoped among us that before the sun next set the Mem would have been brought as low as her lord, by the humbling of Kola Bert.
In the event, Kola Bert came in to bat at No. 7, when the score was 280 and the time half past twelve. Thus the Kola team had 92 more to make in order to equal our first innings’ score, and until a few minutes previously none of us had doubted they would get t
hem by luncheon (1.30 p.m.). But the arrival of Kola Bert at the wicket was definitely encouraging; for it would appear to indicate that we were now into the tail. To judge from Bert’s flaccid fielding, he had long been too far gone for cricket, and if his position as No. 7 was in true accordance with his relative merit as a batsman, there could only be even worse rubbish to follow him. If, on the other hand, Bert had put himself in at No. 7 out of vanity or selfishness, then here at any rate was a quick and easy wicket. We grinned self-indulgently as Bert asked for guard and took up his ‘W G’ stance with left foot cocked. Barry Tooman took a three pace run and launched the first of his hyperbolic donkey drops.
Even a good player finds it hard to deal with Dollies. They take for ever to arrive, they are very trying to watch in the air, they madden otherwise cool men into desperate, ill-tempered swishes, and even if perfectly struck they do not fly sweetly off the bat but either stop dead after twenty yards or, if lofted, sag dismally into the hands of long off. We all waited for Kola Bert to wind himself up like an arbalest for some clownish stroke which would end with his falling on his wicket (or something of the kind) – and were a good bit mortified when he leaned easily back and hooked the ball full toss, as it descended, clean out of the ground. He then did the same thing twice more, at which stage Giles whispered to Barry, who reverted to his normal style of leg break bowling. Not that this troubled Kola Bert. To the fourth ball of the Over, which was on a good length and turning just outside the off stump, he played quietly and precisely back, getting a sight of the new Barry, and both the fifth and sixth balls, which also turned outside the off stump, he cut very late and most exquisitely for four.
Barry’s Over had cost 26 runs. Bert remained unhumbled, quite conspicuously so. How could we, I thought, how could we have made such a stupid mistake? We had surely been playing the game long enough to know that an elderly man who does not put himself out in the field may yet be a most accomplished batsman. Ted had not said that Bert was no good, just that he had a fantasy, which could sometimes prove tiresome, about being W G Grace. Fantasies of this order could inspire as well as derange: I remembered Myles’ 402 on the terrace in the role of J D Robertson (‘Another spanking boundary for “J D”).