by Simon Raven
‘Your man’s fraying at the edges,’ said one of Spotty’s seconds to Sandy.
‘Our man will stick it till he busts,’ Sandy staunchly replied.
The tenth drink was a very dicey one for both competitors. Spotty retched in agony after his self-imposed sconce, and once again, for a couple of minutes or so, you might have had even money. But not for long, because Spotty shook his head and grinned, having evidently recovered for the time being, while James’ sweating sickness was getting worse every second. Great glistering pools gathered beneath his eyes, then cascaded down either side of his nose, along the clefts between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, then over his chin and on to his tunic, which was already darkened, round armpits and shoulders, by the creeping stain of the perspiration which had worked through his shirt. Then at last, despite all social and sartorial habit, he decided to loosen his tie – a concession which improved his looks a little and enabled him, though not without much heavy breathing, to finish his tenth glass.
At this stage both men seemed, for whatever reason, to get another wind. Grimly but not desperately they despatched their eleventh and twelfth glasses (having by now consumed about a bottle apiece), each sticking to the method he had used from the beginning. James was keeping up a good rhythm of sip and gulp, I noticed, while Spotty got through his two periods of waiting in a relaxed yet alert posture which promised ample capacity still in reserve. But at this very moment of apparent steadiness and calm there was a sudden and ugly transformation.
For just as the bookmaking Officers were offering 33 to 1 against either Contestant’s consuming more than 20 glasses, James’ face turned to something like Captain Hook’s ‘rich, green cake’, and Spotty, having given two or three deep and uneasy swallows, came groggily to his feet. By now their thirteenth glasses were before them. Spotty seized his, downed it in one, then sat again, swivelling his eyes and contorting his mouth, looking all in all as though he were watching his wife in flagrant adultery while himself under heavy constraint. No question about it, though: his thirteenth glass was down. How would James respond? Most nobly. Realising that he would never get his glass down by slow stages, he rose to his feet, flung back his head, then tossed the dose off and clamped his mouth shut like a vice.
Thus James, standing, and Spotty, sitting, faced each other at the crisis of the drama. At first it seemed to me that the Match now turned on who could keep his stomach down the longer. But then did it? The Laws said that if both Contestants ‘puked on the Ground (i.e. anywhere in Napier Mess), fainted, had a fit, etc, etc, after consuming an equal amount of liquor, the Match would be pronounced a tie.’ Obviously, in order to win, James not only had to hold down his load longer than Spotty, he also had to get it out of the Mess before he chucked it up; equally obviously, he could not move until released by Spotty’s prior incontinence, except to the loo whither a Judge would attend him; finally, one had to remember that in three and a half minutes’ time both of them would be served with a fresh drink, the arrival of which would raise problems on several most interesting levels.
In the end, both buckled at the same time. Spotty simply opened his mouth, like a drunk don in a Rowlandson print, and sat there while vomit cascaded vertically between his thighs. As for James, his cheeks and lips bulged and bulged and bulged until his lips must surely part or his face explode into fragments…had not Sandy, inspired, called out, ‘OVER HERE,’ and pointed to the double door which led on to the verandah. Quick to take a hint even in extremis, James hurtled through the door, opened his lips, and squirted thirteen double whiskies and twelve tumblers of water in a proud and graceful arc, high over the balustrade of the verandah and on to the massed soldiery below.
There was now grave controversy between the two sets of seconds. True, both Principals had been sick at the same time and after consuming equal amounts of whisky; but (said we) James had deposited his burden outside the Mess, whereas Spotty had incontestably fouled the Ground itself. Granted (said they); but since James’ person was on the Mess verandah, i.e. still in the Mess or on Mess territory, when he ‘laid his kit’, he must be counted to have ‘puked on the Ground’ even though the ‘kit’ itself had landed outside.
The Judges, when the matter was referred to them, inclined against James. This business of the vomit’s landing outside the Mess, they opined, was a pure technicality: morally and judicially James’ performance was on a par with Spotty’s. And indeed a tie would assuredly have been proclaimed, bets paid out accordingly, and their respective contributions to the Purse handed back to the Contestants, had it not been for the magnanimity of Lieutenant Spotty Duvell, who lifted his head from the Bar on which it was uneasily reposing and said, like the Englishman and the sportsman that he was: ‘Give him the Match. I catted on the carpet. He did it dainty, off the verandah. That’s manners, that is: that’s self-control. Like I always said, our boy Jimmy’s got Class.’
Whether the crowd immediately below the verandah would have agreed with this opinion, I do not know; but so the matter was adjudged. A red flare was fired to indicate that the contest was decided, and then a single white flare (it would have been a pair for Spotty, matching his pips) to signify that the victor was James.
In this fashion was concluded The Grand Drinking Match between Jim Prior and Spotty Duvell, contested at Deolali in the June of 1947, when good King George the Sixth was Emperor of India, a whole generation ago. They asked me to tell the story on television some weeks back, for a programme they were getting up about the Right Honourable J M L Prior, Privy Councillor. I duly told my tale to the camera, but was not altogether surprised when it was omitted from the finished film. It has an Hogarthian air which offends the prim nostrils of our time. But I for one think it a good tale which does honour (of a kind) to two good men; and if any should perchance accuse me of having embellished or improved it in the telling, well, I still preserve, at the bottom of my old Indian tin trunk, the slips for the two losing wagers which I struck – to witness if I lie.
VIII
PIECES OF ORDNANCE
When our troopship reached Southampton in July, 1947, a trim and mannerly Major came on board to address us.
‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘the one thing we do not need in England, or in Europe, saving your worships, is Second Lieutenants of Infantry. You are, of course, all Probationary Officers only, and in theory we could withdraw your Commissions. But since this would not be a charitable exercise, it has been decreed that those of you for whom no postings to Infantry Regiments are available (some ninety per cent of you) shall be seconded variously to The Royal Artillery, The Royal Engineers, the Royal Corps of Signals, or the RASC,’ for even this smooth and plausible number could not bear to enunciate that in full. ‘You will be notified, during the course of your disembarkation leave, of your new appointments. Any Officer who fails to give an effective leave address will be Courtmartialed and cashiered instanter. Thank you, gentlemen, for your courteous attention.’
‘All that way and back,’ said James as we filed down the gangway, ‘just to become some kind of mechanic.’
James himself did not become a ‘mechanic’. He was one of the 10 per cent of us who were posted to Infantry Regiments and one of the 2 per cent who were actually posted to their own – now the Norfolks. As for me, you may be chagrined to learn, my destiny was less distinguished, and by mid-August I was serving as theoretical Commander of a Troop of Heavy Anti-Aircraft guns at Rolleston Balloon Camp in the middle of the Salisbury Plain.
The Royal Artillery at that time comprised some of the smartest Regiments (in every sense) along with some of the most dismal in the British Army. The Royal Horse Artillery was to be classed with the better Regiments of Cavalry and the Field Artillery with the more bearable Regiments of Infantry; but Anti-Aircraft Regiments whether Light or Heavy (both, I imagine, now extinct), were pretty near unspeakable, and the Coastal Artillery was quite untouchable. From all of which it followed that, although I had not touched the absolute bottom
, both my social and my military pretensions had taken a sharp slap in the face when I was compulsorily exchanged from the 43rd Light Infantry into the 77th Heavy Ack-Ack.
Matters were not improved by my sour relations with my Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Pugh. Pugh, as I have since come to understand, was an outstanding Officer, of wide experience, sympathetic intelligence and endearing modesty (he was fond of telling us the story of how he failed to get into Winchester, despite intense and prodigious cramming, and had to go to Wellington instead, for he was what would now be called a ‘late developer’). He had been seconded to the Political Service in India before the war (a rare distinction); he was, in principle, a ‘Horse Gunner’, who was now slumming with Ack-Ack only because of the vagaries of the Artillery Rota of Command; and he was clearly due for early promotion (he in fact ended his career as a Major-General). Why should one have been on bad terms with such a man as this? The answer is very simple: Pugh was a ‘lean’ Colonel, a dedicated professional soldier and a very determined careerist: I, on the other hand, was simply an ‘Emergency’ Officer waiting to be demobbed and off to Cambridge. Pugh wanted to run an efficient Regiment (even if it was only Anti-Aircraft), to achieve a high standard of Gunnery, and to be rewarded with Command of a Brigade: I didn’t give a damn for this alien unit and its beastly, noisy guns, and was not prepared to discommode myself in order to make a Brigadier of Lewis Pugh.
What made the situation a great deal worse was that Pugh, who soldiered ‘by the book’, strictly enforced a number of very irritating regulations which were intended to limit or abolish the traditional privileges of Officers in matters of discipline and dress. Thus we were forbidden to wear brown leather fur-lined gloves and made to wear the kind issued to the rank and file, nasty and austere garments of low-grade khaki wool. We were not allowed to carry riding whips but compelled to equip ourselves with mean little sticks of bamboo. We were never permitted to wear Service Dress or Forage Caps; we must appear on parade in the horrible rough Battle Dress of the period, with plebeian berets, dumping Ammunition Boots, and ‘blancoed’ belts and gaiters of a loathsome substance called ‘webbing’.
In short, Pugh went a long way towards taking the fun out of being an Officer. I like to think that had he allowed me to cut just a bit of a figure, if only in the item of the riding crop, I should have accorded him rather more loyalty, but on reflection I am inclined to doubt this: in many ways I was a very unpleasant piece of work at that age (nineteen and a half), idle, conceited, sluttish, self-opinionated, mean-spirited, and deliberately and maliciously obtuse in my refusal to see anyone else’s point of view. As far as I was concerned, Pugh’s Regiment of Ack-Ack was a dowdy washout, Pugh’s efforts to improve it were both laughable and beside any possible point, and Pugh’s professional prospects and ambitions were beneath contempt. I was even too perverse to admit that the tedious sumptuary ordinances on which he insisted, so far from being of his invention, were in fact the spiteful and typical emanations of the Left Wing Administration of the day.
I can only say, in defence of my bloodiness, that there were certain aspects of Pugh himself which invited disaffection. Excellent Officer and splendid man as he was, and as I now fully acknowledge that he was, at the same time he himself would have to admit that he did exercise his Officers and men both long and exigently, less for their good or the Army’s than for the greater glory here on earth of Lewis Pugh. Despite the minimum of assistance from me, he achieved this: as a result of the exertions which he coaxed, nagged or bullied out the 77th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment (RA) he went on and up to command a Brigade of Gurkhas, a coveted and honorific appointment. How very peculiar, then, of Major-General Pugh to omit, when he came to draw up his entry for Who’s Who, any mention of the 77th, which was his immediate springboard to higher command. Every other appointment he ever held is listed; his extra-regimental tours of duty in India, his numerous postings within the Royal Horse Artillery or on to the Staff – all is precisely recorded save only for his stewardship of the dreary but for his purpose essential 77th Regiment of Heavy Anti-Aircraft Guns. Can it be that Lewis Pugh was a snob? I wrote to him a few years back to point out his omission and received a rather shifty reply, the purport of which was that he did not wish to hog too much space in the columns of Who’s Who. Well…he was always, as I remarked a page or two ago, a modest man.
The person who first noticed that the General had omitted the 77th from his entry in WW was Conrad Dehn, just the sort of chap who always sniffs out such things, setting aside, as I believe, an hour or two every month to follow up the careers of his old acquaintance. He followed up Pugh’s because he too served with the 77th as a Second Lieutenant, had indeed been there some months when I arrived in the later summer of 1947.
‘Well, it’s a bonus finding you here,’ I said.
‘I reciprocate the sentiment. And I have to tell you that I have checked up with Charterhouse, and find that you are now absolutely bien vu once more.’
‘Good of you to take such an interest.’
‘I was simply anxious to be able to give exact answers to the questions asked of me when they realised that a fellow Carthusian of mine was coming. I was able to report that you had been lost but were found again.’
‘By which you meant precisely what?’
‘That for one thing a movement is already in train to make you a member of the Old Carthusian Club; and that for another you will be invited to play cricket for the Friars next summer. They would probably have asked you this year if you had arrived back in England a little sooner.’
‘Very gratifying. When am I to be notified of all this?’
‘At any moment now.’
Conrad’s intelligence service was always notably reliable. Within a few days I received a letter from the Secretary of the OC Club, another from the President of the Friars, and a third from the Secretary of the Butterflies Cricket Club, to all of which (thanks to the generous offices of Bob Arrowsmith) I had either been elected or recommended. The Butterflies required an entrance fee, which reminded me that funds were scant and it was time to think out a financial strategy that would procure me adequate exhibition for a dashing young Officer on Home Service. As Lewis Pugh was to decide many years later, there was no obligation, once away from Rolleston, to say much or indeed anything about one’s appointment to Ack-Ack: simply to call myself a ‘Gunner’ would be both truthful and becoming. I might even let it drop that as a Gunner Officer I was deemed to be ‘mounted’ and was therefore entitled to spurs (even if these were not commonly worn with Battle Dress).
But in any event at all, I must put money in my purse. After some thought I caused the tenuous balance of pay at my disposal to be placed with the main branch of Lloyd’s Bank in Cambridge, and then wrote to my maternal grandfather, who lived there and banked with this branch, asking him to have a word with the Manager and give me a favourable chitty. The kind old gentleman did exactly that, and what was more, as I had hoped, he paid a small sum into my Account as a ‘Commissioning Present’. Best of all, he also told the Manager that he would be responsible for any amount by which I might overdraw the account, up to £100. This he did, as he told me in his letter, because he realised that junior subalterns were often subject to fortuitous calls on their resources (a very civil euphemism, I considered, for sudden bouts of vanity or lust): I was to understand, he wrote, that since I was under twenty-one the arrangement was unofficial and could be revoked by the Bank at a moment’s notice; but he ventured to think that they would be reluctant to inconvenience his grandson. Would I please be certain not to tell my mother either about the overdraft or his present, as I would almost certainly remember how disagreeable she had made herself the last time he had given me money.
My resources, if I included the full amount of the overdraft, were now in the order of £130, in those days, when one could dine en prince for a pound, a very substantial sum. I was therefore able, despite the uncertain terms on which I stood with Colonel Pugh,
to enjoy the dying summer on Salisbury Plain in easy and ample fashion. This did not go unremarked by the Colonel, who enquired of my Battery Commander what he knew of my finances. The Battery Commander, a good-natured drinking man, said that he understood I had ‘family money’ (as indeed I had put it about), on hearing which the Colonel rather reluctantly let the matter go at that…until, that is to say, the annoying affair of The Corps Headquarters Match.
What the ‘Corps’ was in this instance, whether a Corps of Artillery or an Infantry Corps to which we were somehow ancillary, I have long forgotten if ever I knew. All I can tell you now is that this Corps in some way comprehended 77 HAA Regiment, that it had a Headquarters which hung out at Uxbridge, and that this Headquarters had got up a cricket XI which came down to play us towards the end of that September (1947).
Now, Rolleston Balloon Camp, though a dreary place enough, had two pleasing features: a copse of elm trees at its centre, which was handy for country copulatives on the nights of Battery dances, and, about a stone’s throw from the copse, a pretty little oval cricket ground. Matches were infrequent, as Lewis Pugh disliked ball games and bestowed such encouragement as he could muster on Association Football, because Soccer was the game which the men preferred and in those early days of Socialism this pernicious criterion was officially paramount and binding; but since it was Corps HQ that asked for a cricket fixture, Pugh was only too keen to set the thing up and even attended the game in person, as a rather significant Brigadier was playing for our opponents.
The match itself passed very agreeably. 77 Regiment managed the decent score of 172 (Raven 0, bowled first ball trying to hit it into the elms) and the opposition had made exactly the same when their last wicket fell to a brilliant catch at mid-on (not made by Raven). Everyone was pleased and excited by this sporting finish; the Brigadier, having made 63, was particularly happy, and so Lewis Pugh was particularly happy. After the game was over, there were ‘informal drinks’ by the Pavilion, of which non-commissioned ranks among the players were invited to partake, in order to demonstrate to the Brigadier what a true democrat was Lewis Pugh and how suitable for higher command in the egalitarian military climate which then obtained. So all was going as merry as a marriage with everyone present – except with me, who was desperate to get away. I had arranged to dine with some woman at The Bustard, a lonely and lovely little inn which was set on the edge of the Ranges and provided imaginative meals for a few shillings. In order to meet my guest in the pub at 7.45 I must leave Rolleston at 7.30; it was now 7.10, and I was still unbathed and unchanged; yet I could not leave the party before the Brigadier, who was getting very jolly and showed no sign of moving.