Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  ‘He maintained that we should have shot him when he failed to deliver the password of the day.’

  ‘Which was technically correct.’

  ‘Which was indeed technically correct, sir. The fact that I used my judgement to ascertain that he was the driver and the only occupant of the vehicle was all that prevented a fatality.’

  ‘Which I have no doubt you pointed out to the major. Just as I have no doubt that he then moderated his attitude.’

  ‘No, sir, he did not. He was both inebriated and uncompromising.’

  Two five-syllable words from the oik. Steel reeled for a moment, then attempted a feeble rally. ‘But he didn’t charge you, as he’d threatened to do.’

  ‘No, sir. He called loudly for the two five two form, but then appeared to forget about the proposed charge.’

  ‘In other words, he moderated his attitude, as I suggested he did.’

  ‘No sir. Major Tarleton was not just inebriated but inconsistent.’ I glanced at him, trying to assess the effect of my latest adjectives. ‘The major was so drunk that I thought he had passed out whilst sitting at the table. But he eventually rose, with my assistance, and made his way back to his car. In view of his condition, I renewed the offer of assistance, but it was again refused. His final words to me were that I was lucky not to be on a charge for failing to shoot him when he failed to give the password.’

  Steel left it at that. He sat down and did not look up from his papers for some time. The defence counsel took me through the key parts of my evidence again, emphasising how they affected the defence he proposed to offer for the later conduct of Staff Sergeant Armstrong. I was then released from the court.

  The proceedings continued for the rest of the day. Everyone knew that George Armstrong had gone over the top in killing an officer whom he must have recognised, though the mitigating plea that he had not meant to kill him was accepted. But everyone had to agree also that the victim had, even if only vicariously, ordered him to do just that when he did not give the password.

  The outcome was that Armstrong was severely reprimanded and reduced in rank from staff sergeant to sergeant. In military terms, it was the nearest thing possible to a non-guilty verdict. If he kept his nose clean and displayed his normal efficiency, he would have his staff sergeant’s crown back above his stripes within a couple of years. George was immediately posted elsewhere and I never saw him again.

  I was relieved that the whole thing was over. I felt quietly elated that I had held my own in there, but far more exhausted than I had expected. I heeded orders and recorded not a word of all this in my letter home to Joy.

  I was glad to eat late and alone in the mess dining room. The events that had led to the court martial still seemed so outlandish as to be scarcely real, though the trial itself was still vivid in my mind. I was completing my first course when I heard a gruff voice giving orders to the private who was my waiter. ‘Be careful what you serve to Sergeant Gregson. He eats commissioned officers for breakfast.’

  I started and turned quickly. The speaker was RSM Bradshaw, whom I’d consulted so nervously two days earlier.

  Fifteen

  My latest group of NCOs working for the Army Certificate of Education Class One were an excellent group. Percy Bishop and others had spread the word about my willingness to help, so that men I had never seen before came in from the units around us and other sergeants’ messes. They were eager to take advantage of the long periods of inactivity whilst they waited for short bursts of military action, and I was just as anxious to achieve something worthwhile in the education centre.

  As always, I had to convince them that they weren’t the thickos they and others thought they were. Once I had done that, they made rapid progress. They were prepared to sweat blood to pass and they often told me that. Nothing so dramatic was in fact required of them.

  Most of them were of better than average intelligence, but they had missed out in their school days, for a variety of reasons. They knew by now that they had practical skills and common sense, because their successive promotions had convinced them of that. But almost all of them told me they were deficient in what they liked to call ‘book skills’. In fact, most of them were at least as bright as their fellow senior NCOs, but they had not acquired the formal qualifications to prove that.

  I was not very experienced myself, so their progress delighted me as well as them. I became aware for the first time of how important the group impetus could be in learning. Once these men had established a rapport and were achieving things, they carried each other along. I set them suitable tasks in maths and English. When they succeeded, they were delighted and not a little astonished. The educational peaks they had set themselves to scale seemed lower than they’d thought.

  They were absurdly grateful for everything I did for them. In the forty years that followed, in a variety of settings, I never found children or adolescents who were as appreciative of my efforts as these tough men. They even volunteered the thought that there was something to be said for schoolies, after all.

  They hardly needed to offer me compliments, pleasing though they were. I was as exhilarated by this as they were. It was my first experience of the satisfaction that comes to a teacher who is succeeding, who is bringing success and perhaps even excitement to his class. I was still so young and so naïve that I did not realise how precious these feelings of unity in achievement were, how rare was this perfect balance between learners and teacher.

  I suppose I had expected enthusiasm and animation from the bright-eyed children I’d taught so briefly in Larnaca, but not from experienced, sardonic men like these. Successful learning was a new experience for them; they were surprised and delighted by it. But they needed success in the Certificate to convince them. They were as nervous as schoolboys as the exams approached. They still had a suspicion that this well-meaning but slightly unworldly young man might be far too optimistic about their abilities.

  He was not. Seventeen of the eighteen passed. The eighteenth was a man whose attendance had been sporadic, through no fault of his own. He passed at the next opportunity, a few months later.

  Both they and my previous set of students met in the education centre to celebrate. The men chose to come here, because in their units their joy still had to be muted. They were now fully qualified to carry their stripes and crowns on a permanent basis: their ranks were substantive. But most of them did not want to proclaim this openly. They had concealed their previous lack of qualifications and allowed their colleagues and the men they directed to think their ranks were substantive. They could scarcely now proclaim the qualifications which remedied their situations.

  So it was because they couldn’t celebrate publicly without exposing their previous lack of qualifications that we had a private party one night in the education centre. They brought bottles and we emptied them all on a lively, sentimental evening. But booze was subsidised and cheap, so that even the copious amounts we consumed hadn’t cost a great deal in the sergeants’ mess.

  Eventually Percy Bishop, the man who had begun all this and who knew me better than any of them, took the initiative. He waved an empty whisky bottle in a wide, alarming arc around his head and said mawkishly, ‘What can we do for you, Jim? We’re all grateful and we want to do something.’ A chorus of drunken assent followed hard upon his words.

  ‘You don’t need to do anything, honestly. I enjoyed it all as much as you did.’

  ‘But all the shame, we want to do summat, don’t we lads? We want to chelebrate with you.’ Again the triumphant sweep of the Bolton arm. And this time an even larger cheer, in response to his drunken slur and his dislodging of a book from my desk.

  I picked up the book and glanced at its cover. It was a book I had read in my room and was planning to leave in the education centre. I kept quiet about my reading tastes in the mess, wanting to be one of the boys there rather than an effeminate schoolie who read poetry. But now, on my own ground and boosted by drink, I was suddenly bold.r />
  ‘There is something you could do, if you’re serious about this.’ I turned the book so that the title faced them: Selected poems of Dylan Thomas. I grinned at the boisterous faces in front of me. ‘I can’t remember which one of you it was who said that poetry was rubbish.’

  They looked at each other in cheerful surmise. ‘Could have been any of us!’ said a stolid RE sergeant. Another drunken cheer of approval, this time with much drunken laughter.

  ‘Right. We’ll meet here on Thursday night. Sober, this time. And we’ll have a session on poetry. I’ll try to show you it’s not rubbish. Only one condition: you have to give me a fair hearing.’

  ‘You won’t bloody succeed!’ Another roar of assent.

  ‘Maybe I won’t. But I’d like to have a go. And you all said you’d like to do something to please me.’ I put my hands against the side of my head and tried to pout like Marilyn Monroe – it was meant to be her in The Seven Year Itch, but it was probably more like a spoilt child.

  ‘That’s what poetry does for you,’ said Percy with disgust.

  A sergeant in the Welsh Fusiliers who had been one of my best students saved the day for me. He looked at the book and said, ‘Dylan Thomas. He were no nancy boy.’

  ‘He’d have drunk you lot under the table,’ I said challengingly.

  ‘He were Welsh, see, Dylan,’ said the sergeant proudly. ‘I don’t mind coming, if we can have some Dylan Thomas.’

  ‘We can have all Dylan Thomas, if you want,’ I said daringly.

  ‘Here, you can’t let the Taffs take us over!’ said the RE sergeant. ‘We’ve got Shakespeare, ain’t we?’

  It was settled before most of them knew quite what they’d agreed to. Thursday night was to be a poetry session with Sergeant Gregson, and they’d all come. Just to keep him happy, mind – they hadn’t gone poncey.

  I had a hangover the next morning. And in the bright and fiercely sober light of the new day, a poetry evening didn’t seem such a good idea. Bold, yes, but perhaps a little too bold. Too ambitious, maybe. As I studied the unsmiling breakfast faces in the sergeants’ mess, I thought that Dickens might have been a better suggestion. I told myself as firmly as I could that this was education in the proper sense, not just cramming for exams. This was introducing experienced men to beauties which had been denied to them for half their busy lives.

  Educate and entertain at the same time, I told myself. The stern Lord Reith was no longer Director-General of the BBC, but he was still alive. And the young and idealistic James Gregson was much influenced by his watchwords. I managed to get Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night and the opening pages of Under Milk Wood typed out and duplicated in the company office of the Welsh Fusiliers. I distributed the sheets to what I knew would be a resistant group on Thursday night.

  I began with the surest thing I could think of: John of Gaunt’s speech about England from Richard II, which I knew by heart from my school days. I fancied that ‘this precious stone set in a silver sea’ and the other images would go down well, and I built up consciously to ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’.

  I’d planned to discuss how Shakespeare’s rhythm and images built up effects which would have been impossible in prose, but I was disconcerted by a round of applause. It wasn’t ironic, as it might have been among students mocking my histrionics. One of the men in front of me growled ‘Winston Churchill’ and gave me a lead.

  ‘Not Churchill, George, but Churchill quoting Shakespeare. Winston had a great feel for verse and he knew how the poetry of our greatest writer could boost morale in the darkest days of the war.’ The bard had given me a good start. I asked my Welsh Fusilier sergeant to read the opening of Under Milk Wood. It wasn’t Richard Burton, but it was good enough. The phrases rang sonorously around the quiet room and the rich descriptions were much appreciated by the men studying the sheets in front of them.

  I hastened to take advantage of this. ‘It doesn’t really matter whether it’s poetry or prose, does it? It’s the richness of the language that grips you. The scene is set for us as vividly as if we could see it – more vividly, in some ways, because good poets and good writers use words which suggest things beyond the obvious and the visible.’

  It was Percy Bishop who came up with the question I wanted. ‘Where is this place, Jim?’ He glanced at the paper. ‘Where is this “Llareggub”?’ He struggled over the word, as a Lancastrian was surely allowed to do.

  ‘Look at that word on your sheets. See anything in it?’

  They all did that. Blessedly for me, none of them knew the joke. Eventually a couple of them chuckled. It was the Welshman who cried delightedly, ‘It’s “Bugger all” spelt backwards. He were a clever sod, that Dylan!’

  ‘Indeed he was, Dai. Very down to earth, Dylan Thomas was. And I’m willing to bet he downed more drink and bedded more women than any man here.’

  They were duly impressed by that claim. There was clearly something to be said for poetry. They knew a lot about sexual frustration for men. But they caught the pathos of frustration for women too in this writing. They were much impressed by Thomas’s description of the country girl left breathless by the thoughtless Gomer Owen, ‘who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn’t looking and never kissed her again, although she was looking all the time’.

  I took them on then to the sheet with the complete poem on it. We discussed at some length the notion that the poet’s father should ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’. They were more enthusiastic than I had dared to hope. They made me read the whole poem and applauded me again at the end.

  Young as I was in this assembly, I had enough sense to desist whilst I was still winning. I thanked them for giving me this evening as my reward. Then we went across to the snooker room in the mess and Percy and I won a quid from two of them. Normal service was restored.

  *

  My euphoria did not last long. On Monday morning, I was called into the education centre by Major Barker.

  I had picked up odd facts in the mess to add to what I already knew about my controlling officer and bête noire. In six months’ time, he would complete his army service and depart to the UK, with much of his life still ahead of him and a fat pension to support it. He had a clean record; the officers’ employment services would probably find him a lucrative and not-too-taxing post in British industry.

  Meanwhile, he wanted a quiet life. The fact that little or nothing went on in his well-equipped education centre was an unfortunate result of the Cyprus emergency and the need for troops to give their minds to more vital issues than education. That was the fiction he promoted at every opportunity. A harassed military establishment was for the most part far too busy to contest it.

  His concern was to protect himself against radical thinkers like Sergeant Gregson, who wished to use the education centre to educate troops. He needed to keep me on the strength of his RAEC unit, because his own status was dependent on the number of staff assigned to him. But he’d apparently decided some time ago to do something about me, and had been waiting for his opportunity. He looked at me sternly from behind his office desk and said, ‘We need to review your work and your performance here, Sergeant Gregson.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’d be happy if we could do that. I feel underemployed at the moment, as far as education is concerned. I’ve identified a few opportunities. I think we can offer something to the huge numbers of troops in this area.’

  ‘You take too much upon yourself, Sergeant. I am your commanding officer. I am the man to put forward new initiatives, not you.’

  ‘Of course, sir. I am only anxious to offer my assistance and the little knowledge of local circumstances which I have been able to acquire.’ The army had taught me something. I could bullshit with the best of them now.

  ‘I repeat, you take too much upon yourself, sergeant. I should not need to remind you of that, nor of your rank and mine. You have been running classes in this education centre without either my permission or my
approval. In fact, without even my knowledge, until very recently.’

  I’d been thinking of advocating basic education for large numbers of deprived infantrymen, so it took me a moment to understand his complaint. ‘You mean the classes I ran for the Army Certificate of Education, Class One, sir? The initiative for that came from the senior NCOs themselves, not me, sir. And I knew that you would be proud that we were achieving things for deserving men. I’m sure it will do our reputation a lot of good in important places. Men like these are the backbone of the army, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They’ve been held back from substantive ranks only by their lack of the appropriate certificates, sir. I found the vast majority of them quite intelligent and well up to the required standard.’

  My enthusiasm was running away with me, but I was surely on firm ground here, even with this idle old bugger.

  ‘You conducted these activities in secret, sergeant. According to my informant, you even devised practical map-reading exercises, which were conducted around the perimeter of this camp on Saturday afternoons.’

  ‘It was the best we could do, sir, with the present rules about not venturing out of camp except on duty.’

  ‘These classes which you took it upon yourself to mount were conducted in secret. You opened up this building without my permission.’

  ‘The men involved didn’t want publicity, sir. They were understandably sensitive about their lack of educational qualifications.

  ‘The fact remains that you did not have my permission.’

  ‘I was sure that you would only approve, sir. I can assure you that the ACE Class One courses proved eminently worthwhile. That was almost entirely due to the attitude of the men involved. Even with your tremendously wide experience of army education, sir, I can’t think that you can ever have encountered a group of men more eager to learn.’

  Barker glared at me, but I was in full bullshit mode and refused to meet his eye. ‘The fact remains that you first set up these classes and then conducted them without my permission.’