by Jeremy Scott
‘How do I know it works?’ I asked.
‘Oh, him work,’ he said, affronted. ‘Him work fucking well.’
‘How much?’
‘Five pounds.’
It was a huge sum. I paid quickly and hurried to join the ship.
We sailed at sunset. Soon after the Royals’ officers assembled in the first-class saloon, loud with indignation. Conditions afloat were not those to which they were accustomed. Quite large and senior officers found themselves stacked three to a cabin and sharing a shower. I remained quiet in the grumbling storm. The Royals were not the only troops returning on the ship; in the adjutant’s list I had as usual been separated from my fellows and assigned to share a cabin with two airforce officers – beyond the pale in regimental terms.
Shown there by a steward, I’d chosen the best bunk, unpacked, and sat fondling my Spanish fly when the ship began to move. Neither of my room-mates had turned up. Quickly I deranged their bunks; with pillows and my suitcase I humped the blankets into the shape of seasick airmen. By nature untidy, I let myself go. Within a few minutes the look of the place was enough to deter the casual visitor, who would have recoiled from what was clearly an overcrowded, unhealthy slum. I sought out and bribed the steward. Back in my revolting lair I practised the sound of fighter pilots throwing up. Privacy was assured.
In ugly mood the regimental herd moved in to dinner. I left the table early, returning to the saloon where the vast silver orb of the regimental coffee urn had been set up and bubbled upon its burner. Around its swollen sides the steaming horses of the Heavy Brigade galloped in bass relief, charging each other’s bottoms. Bending to adjust the flame, I raised the lid minutely and dropped the Spanish fly into the scalding contents.
In pairs, in small bellicose groups, the regimental officers tramped into the saloon from dinner, port glasses clutched in their hands and a high colour mounting to their cheeks as they assembled round the coffee urn. I did not take a cup myself, but watched with gleeful anticipation as they served themselves, then with anticipation turning to disappointment, for I saw no change in them at all. They sprawled, they drank, they grunted in conversation. They belched and farted as usual after dinner. And then … and then … Did I imagine it, or did a restlessness fall upon the first-class saloon? They rose to their feet, they paced, they hitched their trousers, they stamped, they roared.
Certainly disquiet had infected them. They called for drink, countermanded their orders, bawled out the barman. Loud, argumentative conversations were begun, only to be abandoned in mid-sentence. A game was started, getting round the room without touching the floor. Normally popular, even over this new course tonight it did not answer. After breaking a couple of coffee tables it was abandoned, their hearts were elsewhere. Restlessly they kicked the furniture, peered from the portholes at the sliding waste of water, impatience in their glance, bloodshot longing in their eyes. For what? A kill? The unmentionable?
And then abruptly they retired, leaving me to stare at the swollen orb of the coffee urn as a vision danced before my eyes … the officers and gentlemen of the Royal Dragoons in uncontrollable homosexual rut. Aboard ship, buggers can’t be choosers.
Alone in my cabin I slept well, waking at 8 am, the sky bright, the sea untroubled. I dressed and made my way to the dining saloon. Tables laid and waiting, the place was deserted. The steward seemed surprised to see me. ‘You up, you well?’ he said. ‘My, my.’
‘Not at all well,’ I murmured, simulating weakness.
‘Not hungry are you, surely?’
‘Certainly not,’ I answered in a sickly voice, looking ravenously at the crisp rolls, the mounds of butter, the eggs and bacon sizzling in the griddle pans. ‘But a coffee might be good for me, perhaps just one piece of toast.’
I retired to my cabin to read, but hunger brought me out again at noon. The dining saloon was still empty. ‘My, you’re a one,’ the steward said, ‘The only one.’
‘The others …?’ I enquired.
‘No they won’t be eating,’ he said quite definitely. He’d gone with beef tea to a couple of cabins and returned shaken. ‘Losing it at both ends, spewing their guts up,’ he reported.
‘Serious?’ I asked nervously. Even in my furthest imaginings I hadn’t intended to become a mass murderer.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Came over a little queer is all, but that’s behind them. It’ll pass. A few days at sea and they’ll be right as rain again, you’ll see.’
Yes, I thought, I probably would. Nothing would change these people. Whatever happened to them, one couldn’t hope for any lasting moral improvement. However, during the time the vessel was mine and before my fellow officers became their unspeakable selves again, I determined to enjoy the voyage.
Studying the menu, I ordered a large and well-earned lunch.
8
Germany
Once back in England most of the regiment sloped off on leave, but I remained in barracks as part of the skeleton force manning the transit camp. ‘You’re to be sent ahead to Germany,’ Rodney informed me one day. ‘They think you don’t fit in here, that you’re not really one of us,’ he explained.
I went to the regiment’s new station at Wesendorf in Germany as one of only three officers in the Royals’ advance party. Bradish-Ellames, Rodney and myself lived as guests of the 15/19th Hussars, whom we were to replace as part of the occupying force of 600,000 men defending civilisation against the Russian army camped on the other side of the nearby fence and minefield stretching from the Baltic to Austria, which partitioned West from East Germany.
The accommodation and mess had been purpose built in the late ’thirties for the Luftwaffe, who clearly were used to a higher standard of taste, comfort and general aménagements than British officers. My room, which had an en suite bathroom, was large, well furnished, and had a view over the pine forest. The mess was spacious and high-ceilinged, panelled in dark wood. Embellished with the resident regiment’s paintings of cavalry charges, battle scenes, monumental silver artefacts, leather chesterfields and chairs, it looked 100 per cent British: a St James’s gentlemen’s club.
I mingled easily with the young officers of the 15/19th. My state-of-Coventry had not come with me to this new location. Instead of driving senior officers purple with fury, my uniforms were considered enviably fashionable by some here. Many young men in the outside world were now wearing trousers similar to mine – if perhaps not quite so tight.
The 15/19th Hussars weren’t such a smart cavalry regiment as the Royals who, occupying the right of the line and standing closest to the sovereign, considered themselves superior to all. The Hussar officers were mainly not Etonians and less obsessively snobbish than the Royals, most of whom had chosen the army for their career and the regiment because their father and grandfather had served in it before them.
Life in the Wesendorf mess was just as formalised and ritualistic as before however. We dressed up in elaborate uniform, chain mail and spurs to swill claret from silver mugs and pass the port down a polished dinner table set for thirty, groaning beneath the weight of regimental silver statuary. But the young officers were a deal more friendly than I’d been used to. These people spoke to me, two of them even asked the name of my tailor.
‘Don’t want to get too chummy with them,’ Rodney warned. ‘It’s not on. Bad form, you know.’
A poker school existed in the mess, which played most evenings after dinner. The stakes were higher than I could afford to lose, for unlike the others I was living on my pay of £5 a week, but soon after arriving in Wesendorf I joined it.
Apart from weaponry, explosives and garrotting, poker was the only thing I was good at. The coaching I’d received from Uncle Tony served me well when I came to play in the Wesendorf mess. I didn’t play more skilfully than the others, but I played less recklessly and, unlike them, never drew to an inside straight. It’s not a help to gamble against people with more money than yourself and in a high-raise game. You can’t always risk following
your judgement. But often I won, and sometimes I won well.
Holding four jacks against a full house and a flush, I won so well one night I bought a car. I didn’t like possessions, owning things made me uneasy; I’d never owned anything except my Colt .45, my .22 revolver and, briefly, my Swiss watch. Even when, later, I could afford to buy clothes everything I possessed in the world fitted into two suitcases I could carry easily by myself. But when I first glimpsed the two-seater supercharged Auto Union Wanderer sports convertible, I fell in love instantly. Above 3,000 revs the noise of the supercharger was a sustained howl. Built for the Le Mans 24-hour race, the car had the acceleration of a startled kangaroo and would do 120 mph on the autobahn.
One of the members of the 15/19th poker school was Ben Fisher, whose studious appearance and wry self-deprecating manner contrasted strongly with the boisterous exuberance of the rest. I liked him from the start, but it was a while before I sounded him out on what he was planning to do when he left the army. Most of the other National Service officers seemed to know exactly what they were going into – generally estate management, stockbroking or banking – and the question featured insistently in the letters I was receiving from Father.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ Fisher admitted cheerfully.
‘Don’t you have family and relations who can fix it like everyone else?’ I asked.
‘Heavens no!’ he said, explaining that his father was a rural dean. ‘We know absolutely nobody and Daddy only has about six parishioners, he spends all his time in his study writing books.’
‘What sort?’ I asked.
‘His last was a Dictionary of medieval agricultural terms used in Essex, it wasn’t a best seller, exactly. No, Daddy’s no help there at all. The only jobs I’ve seen are schoolmaster, the Church or the army, and they look so frightfully dull. I’d much rather be a professional card sharp on a Mississippi river boat.’
‘Really?’ I said. Here was a man I could relate to. We formed a working partnership with an operating capital of £150. He owned a car even more impractical and unreliable than my own, one of Detroit’s all-time lemons: the Keizer-Frazer. Fisher’s did nine miles to the gallon and broke down constantly, but in it or my Wanderer regularly after dinner we drove 140 miles to Travemunde on the Baltic coast. A small old-fashioned resort of boardwalks and wooden houses, its focus was a casino dating from the Belle Époque. Few in defeated Germany had money to gamble at that time; business was poor and the groups of young British officers in mess uniform, booted and spurred, often drunk, were a necessary clientele. In pragmatic fashion the invader was made welcome and here, night after night, Fisher and I played with dedicated concentration at the roulette table. We thought of ourselves not as punters but hard-eyed pros, honing and perfecting our career skills.
Gambling and raffish behaviour appealed to us. Fisher and myself were strongly attracted to the disreputable – only Nigel was exempt. Our parents were worthy and respectable; they’d done their duty, fought, suffered and gone short to save civilisation from the Hun. But we were the post-Waugh generation, and in the years of drab austerity and rationing in Britain which followed their hard-won victory, the rake had emerged again as a desirable role model.
None emulated it more determinedly than Ivor Mottron, an officer in a nearby regiment, who had ash blond hair and the pale blue eyes of a Weimaraner. Also a Slav wife with a chiselled face of immodest beauty and a nature wilful and unstable as his own. As a couple they were astonishingly good looking. Quite unlike anyone else I’d come across in the army, they gave off a rackety carefree glamour; both were wantonly reckless in their behaviour.
Frequently in pressing debt, Ivor and Natassia were wildly extravagant. He lived then and for years afterwards on the expectation of an inheritance and on credit. By the army, Natassia’s sometimes dramatic behaviour was understood because she was ‘foreign’. And Ivor’s capricious liaisons and excesses were excused, even applauded as ‘showing form’. Rather than antagonising, they endeared him to his young brother officers, who were ignorant of his past. She had grown up in Paris and met Ivor in Capri, where both were being looked after by others; but lightning passed between them at first sight and they’d eloped together, penniless and bankrolled only by their beauty and allure. Ivor’s patron, devastated by his defection, had pursued him with a telegram. It read: COME AT ONCE DESPERATELY RICH.
I was entranced by their glamour and recklessness and careless style. I passed almost every weekend staying at their house. They had no car, for Ivor of course had crashed it, and we used the two-seater Wanderer to get to Hamburg for the evening. Late at night we drove back crushed together in the sports car’s padded cockpit, and there was a highly erotic charge in the feel of her supple body pressed against my own, the smell of her scent, and the long scream of the supercharger as we hurtled along the dead straight road through the Luneberger forest at over 100 mph. High on youth, drink and the exhilaration of excess, the three of us shared an intimacy that embraced everything, including the real possibility of our sudden deaths, and I realised I was in love with both of them.
In due course the main body of the Royals arrived in Wesendorf. Fisher and the Hussars moved on, and the mess was colonised with our own battle paintings of cavalry charges, portraits of the dressy dead, and monstrous weight of regimental silver. The expensively educated squirearchy tramped into their new home to lower their large bottoms into the leather armchairs and bellow for drink.
They formed not so much a tribe as an upper-crust gang, with similar backgrounds, upbringing, tastes and prejudices. They disliked Jews, black people, lefties, ‘cleverness’ and culture. They didn’t like women much, but they loved horses and dogs. Having been born English, they believed they had won first prize in the lottery of life and behaved accordingly. Twice a week, on mess nights, we dressed up in full blues uniform for dinner. After a heavy meal of pork or boar stew, school pudding and a lot of port, everyone would tramp from the dining room with spurs jingling. They’d stamp and fart to dispel their after-dinner lethargy, then someone – usually Birbeck would call for a game.
Birbeck was ruddy faced, burly, boisterous and rich and he didn’t give a damn for anyone’s opinion. His favourite game involved getting around the room without touching the floor. Birbeck loved this because he was so good at it. Although a heavily built man with a broad bottom and substantial gut, he got around the course faster than anyone else, invariably breaking more furniture than the rest. Rather unwillingly, I came to like him.
One evening I drove with Rodney to have dinner in Hamburg and visit the red-light district. The Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking the Alster, was then an officers’ club. Over Tournedos Rossini and a couple of bottles of claret Rodney said, ‘We’ll be leaving the regiment in a few months. Got what you want to do sorted out, have you?’
‘Hardly,’ I told him. ‘You?’
‘Chap’s got to think of the way the world’s going,’ he said. ‘Dollars, greenbacks, real money – that’s what counts nowadays.’
‘You mean go to America?’ It was something I longed to do myself. I knew the country well from the cinema; the USA seemed an infinitely more glamorous and exciting place than Britain.
‘God no!’ said Rodney, appalled. ‘Wouldn’t want to do that! Get the buggers on your own turf. Stick it to them there.’
‘Stick what?’ I asked.
‘Our place. Ship them down for weekends. Polish up the silver, drop the word that Kent comes down to shoot.’
‘Rodney! Isn’t that selling out on your heritage?’
‘Not at all!’ The suggestion made him huffy. ‘You’ve no idea how expensive horses and staff are to keep these days – not always satisfactory, either. They’ll like old Banks the butler, though – he shuffles well and we could dress him up a bit. Country house weekends! Take it from me, they’ll pay through the nose for them.’
Everyone else seemed to know what they were going to do in life. Beyond buying a white suit, becoming a professional g
ambler and trusting to God, I had no idea myself. Occasionally it bothered me, as it did now.
We were fairly drunk by the time we’d finished dinner. Leaving the supercharged Wanderer outside the Four Seasons, we took a taxi to the Reeperbahn. We walked down the narrow cobbled street, lined on both sides by windows, a half-naked woman in each one. Garishly made up, most were unattractive, fat and middle-aged. The street was crowded with drunk soldiers and smelt of sick. Both Rodney and I had come here before for brief unsatisfying couplings which left me feeling there must be more to sex than this or Henry Miller would not have written about it with such feeling.
Tonight we were looking for an exhibition Rodney had heard about and particularly wanted to see. At last we found it, a small, red-lit, overheated room where eight men crouched or stood around a table on which a woman was seated, feet upon its surface.
She hauled up her skirts. ‘Gimme a cigarette,’ she ordered.
Rodney stepped forward, offering a tin of duty-free Benson and Hedges. She took one and, putting down the tin, he lit it for her. Inhaling deeply, the woman lay back on her elbows and inserted the cigarette between the lips of her vagina. I with the rest in the airless crowded room stared in astonishment as her abdomen contracted, then relaxed. A cloud of blue smoke puffed out, wreathing through the black forest of her pubic hair to float toward the ceiling. My startled glance flinched from the sight to the Benson and Hedges tin on the table between her legs. The brand’s advertising slogan, featuring on poster hoardings throughout the country and current for years, slanted in copperplate script across the open lid: Where Only the Best Will Do.
Much later we found our way back to the car parked by the Alster. My own drunkenness had by now transmuted into a stoned-out lucidity that welcomed the idea of the eighty-mile drive ahead, but Rodney didn’t want the fun to end. While getting into the car he spotted a covey of duck on the water, thirty yards from shore. Grabbing my .22 revolver from the door pocket where I kept it, he rested his elbows on the convertible’s soft-top to take unsteady aim. Bang … bang … bang … bang … bang … bang … In the absolute tranquillity of the city’s dawn he loosed off six rounds, happily missing wide.