by John Winton
‘Now I’ll come to the bit ye’ll all be wanting to hear,’ said the P.M.O. solemnly. ‘The chances of catchin’ something. I’ll be frank with you. There’s no real safeguard against venereal disease except total abstinence, just as there’s no real safeguard against getting drunk except not drinkin’. But it would be a poor world without women and drink, would it not? The next best thing to abstinence is continence. If you can’t contain yourself, then at least control yourself. And take care. My Chief Nightingale up at the Sick Bay will be delighted to fix you up. I can’t be tellin’ ye that too often.
The P.M.O. put away his notes in his pocket.
‘All I’ve been tellin’ ye,’ he went on, ‘goes all to hell if you’ve been drinkin’ too much. If you’re drunk, you’ll behave like an animal and an animal has never heard of birth control. It’s easily done. Several of you go ashore together. On the way you have a drop to drink until one of you has a drop too much. He’s the one we’ll call Paddy. When you all decide to go, Paddy wants to stay where he is, where it’s warm and he can see the women. He won’t be wantin’ to be pushed into the cold where there’s no beer and no women. So he stays where he is and the rest of you go on without him. From that minute, Paddy is half-way towards the Sick Bay. Now that’ll be enough from me. I’ve got some films to show you which’ll let ye see what happens to Paddy after you’ve left him. They’ll not need any comment from me so I’ll leave ye to them. I tried to get you the ones they show to the Wrens but they’re booked up for years ahead so you’ll just have to make do with these.’
The P.M.O. left the messdeck. After everyone else had sat down again The Bodger remained standing.
‘Before we see the P.M.O.’s blue films,’ he said, ‘I want to emphasise what the P.M.O. said on the subject of liquor. Most of the local drinks in the Mediterranean are an acquired taste. Stuff like Spanish brandy, absinthe, ouzo and arrack are drunk by the local inhabitants by the quart. But if you start drinking them you’ll get drunk very quickly. Some of the worst stuff will not only make you drunk, it may send you blind. In the old days they used to sell a white stick with every crate of it. Things are not so bad now as they used to be, but even now quite a lot of the local hooch will do you a power of no good. Stick to sherry or beer. Sherry is very cheap in Gibraltar and Spain and you can get some first class stuff for very little compared with what you would have to pay for it in England. That’s all I have to say on that. Now for the P.M.O.’s ciné bleu.’
7
As she made her stately way down to her berth, Barsetshire bore up under the scrutiny of the other British and American ships in the harbour like a dowager at a reception who knows that she is probably the eldest lady present but is sure that her pearls are still the best in the room. Her white scrubbed quarterdeck, her burnished and brushed guard and band, and the slow ripple of water past the grey side in the golden Mediterranean early morning, completed a picture which had not been wonderfully created by an artist but by a set of instructions embellished by a tradition. Each part of the picture, each member of Barsetshire’s ship’s company was intent on his own role and hardly conscious of the effect which the whole achieved, but together they lifted the heads of the American sailors, leaning over the guard rails and chewing their morning gum, and made them listen to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ which Barsetshire’s band were playing in their honour, and look at Barsetshire herself with respect.
Gibraltar was both the start and the finish of a foreign commission in one of H.M. Ships. Every ship on her way to the Mediterranean, South Atlantic, East Indies or Far Eastern Stations counted her time properly abroad from the day she entered Gibraltar. No ship on her way home passed through the Straits without calling there. It was the first portal to the east and the last milestone before home. Most of the sailors ashore in Gibraltar were therefore fresh from home and enjoying their first taste of a foreign port or on their way back to England and enjoying their last visit to a foreign port. The citizens of Gibraltar were subjected to the constant merry-making of ever-renewing, never-tiring hordes of sailors.
The novelty of the celebrations wore off for the Gibraltarians some time early in the nineteenth century. Since then they have watched the antics of the Royal Navy ashore in their citadel follow an ancient and time-honoured pattern. Beer bottles bearing traditional labels sail through the windows of the same bars. The same cars are overturned. The pavements in Main Street have been worn thin by the waiting boots of innumerable patrols. The Naval Provost Marshal has been issuing identical warnings for over a century and the longest-standing and most eagerly read column in the Gibraltar press is the one dealing with the outrages of sailors. When the Americans began to come to Gibraltar, some of the more wishful-thinking of the Gibraltarians hoped that times would change but experience showed that the American sailors ashore behaved much like the British except that they were, if anything, more thorough in anything they attempted and more generous in the payment of compensation. In the process of time the more philosophical Gibraltarians have grown accustomed to the intoxicated sailor and accept him for the trade he brings; they regard the nightly wassail in Main Street as one of the penalties of living in a gateway to the East. An entrance to a main road must expect its share of traffic incidents.
None of the junior cadets had been to Gibraltar before but they were all inheritors of an extensive folk-lore of visits there in other ships and in other cruises which was passed on to them by the Instructors and by the senior cadets. The Chief G.I., in particular, seemed to have brought so much trade to the local trades and professions of Gibraltar and La Linea that some of the junior cadets wondered why he was not made a Freeman.
The Chief G.I. collected the leave cards when the cadet libertymen mustered on the upper deck for inspection.
‘All off ashore?’ he asked sardonically, and unnecessarily.
‘You’ll have to go across the border if you want to get your hand on it. You won’t get a bit this side. Fifty pesetas, and then you’ll be seen off.’
‘A bit of what?’ asked George Dewberry wonderingly.
‘A bit of crumpet’ said Raymond Ball.
‘Crumpet?’
‘Skip it.’
‘That reminds me’ said Paul. ‘Did you get our passes, Mike?’
‘Yep. The Bodger gave them to me. You all owe me two bob.’
‘Libertymen carry on down into the boat’ said the Chief G.I. ‘Don’t all rush at once.’
‘I wonder which of us will be Paddy?’
‘I reckon George Dewberry is our best bet’ said Raymond Ball.
‘I don’t see Trog Maconochie anywhere’ said Paul.
‘He’s looking for his belt. Little does he know I’m wearing it.’
‘How shall we play it this evening?’
‘Well’ said Paul, ‘I vote we have something to drink first, and then something to eat, and then a little more to drink and by that time it’ll be time to go across the border.’
‘The Bodger told me there’s not much point in going across before ten and it’s a good idea to get back before the border closes at one. Otherwise they keep you in a Spanish jail for months while they find out from Cadiz what to do with you.’
‘I expect he knows by experience. I bet The Bodger’ll be good for the woman’s rent, rates, laundry and groceries and probably educate one of the children as well.’
In the first few hundred yards from the landing stage the cadets met more American patrols than Gibraltarians, but once up the steps and into Main Street they found themselves swallowed up in the beginnings of an evening which Gibraltar had come to know very well.
The bars were all similar. They had swing doors, a band with a female trumpeter on a dais, and they were full of sailors. The bars sounded the same, with the jarring notes of a trumpet, drums and castanets, shouts and songs and the accumulated sound of voices talking, bottles clinking and shuffling feet. In the street, bullfight posters were pasted on the blank spaces of the wall by a lottery stand. Th
e shops offered highly coloured rugs, cigarette lighters, cameras, clocks, shirts, watches, bales of cloth, handbags, bullfight photographs, toy monkeys and perfume. There were very few cars and those made their way slowly between the crowds who walked in the centre of the narrow street. American and British sailors jostled small, swarthy men in pastel-shaded suits. The women watched from the tiny balconies with latticed and fretted windows on the first floor.
As the sun went down in rose and scarlet and finally indigo far out in the Atlantic beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the noise in Main Street swelled. The music from the bars grew louder and the swing doors belched out a stream of sailors who tumbled into the street, picked themselves up and tottered to the bar next door. The tinkling of broken glass attracted a patrol from the other side of the street and they went into the bar to quell the first fight. Their entrance was the cue for redoubled shouts from inside and higher and more frenzied notes on the trumpet while the castanets carried on their steady ticking without a break in their rhythm. The Gibraltar evening was warming up according to its traditional schedule.
The cadets ate prawn cocktails, swordfish steaks and pineapple fruit salad and afterwards drank beer quietly in bars where girls of fourteen or fifteen in flaring skirts danced the paso doble with dark youths in tight-fitting trousers and short black jackets.
‘Come on, George. Don’t be a Paddy!’
The name struck a chord of memory. George Dewberry straightened up.
‘Lord no!’ he snorted indignantly. ‘Don’ wanna be a Paddy. Ya know what h-happens to Paddys!’
‘Come on then.’
George Dewberry reluctantly followed the others outside. He had been enjoying the heat and the taste of the beer in his throat and the dizzy dancing of the women.
They changed their money into pesetas at the end of Main Street and took a taxi to the border. They walked across into Spain, where the frontier guards took no more notice of them than if they had been Spanish flies, although they looked concerned when George Dewberry lurched towards a bullfight poster.
George Dewberry led the way by instinct into the first bar.
The walls were tiled with scenes from the bullfight. The bar itself was of hard black wood polished with a wet cloth and barrels of sherry were stacked to the roof behind it. The bartender kept each customer’s score chalked on the bar and no money passed until the customer was ready to leave. Each drinker was besieged by a clamouring crowd of shoe-shine boys, men selling fountain pens and postcards, and small girls holding baskets of peanuts and flowers.
The bar was crowded with officers from Barsetshire, among them The Bodger, who had his arm round the bartender’s wife, and was loudly calling for Fundadore for both of them.
Raymond Ball looked around him.
‘Might as well be back in Barsetshire’ he said disgustedly. ‘Come on, Paul. Let’s try somewhere else. This place is too sordid for words.’
They collected George Dewberry, who, in one crowded minute, had had his right shoe polished and had bought three bags of peanuts, a carnation and a postcard of two women wrestling with a donkey, and went outside.
Deeper in the town they came upon a street which reeked of lechery. The air smelt sickly, over-ripe with the smell of offal and garbage. The very houses huddled lewdly together and women in the doorways winked invitingly at the cadets and leapt out into the street to snatch at them.
‘Golly!’ said Paul. ‘This is like something out of Hogarth in one of his juicier moods. Let’s get out of the light before we all get raped.’
Raymond Ball might have considered the bar they had just left sordid, but the first bar the cadets tried in this street showed him that there were still depths they had not plumbed.
The bar was small and dark and had a stale smell. It contained two women, one behind the bar and the other in front.
Both were past their prime but they had been good-looking in their youth and even now they had preserved a lush maturity of figure which made George Dewberry’s eyes pop.
‘Ai-yai-yai!’ he said excitedly.
‘Quiet, you bloody idiot!’ whispered Paul. ‘You’re here to drink and that’s all. Either of those harridans could eat you alive and come back for more, so keep your eyes in the boat.’
Paul ordered four sherries.
But the woman in front of the bar had already noticed that George Dewberry was the most susceptible member of the party. She sidled up to him.
She was wearing a sagging black dress which drooped low over her breasts.
‘What your name, Joe?’ she grated in a metallic voice which made George Dewberry start like a spurred stallion.
‘Paddy,’ answered George Dewberry brightly.
‘Come to bed, Paddy.’
‘Oh I say!’
‘Come to bed, Paddy.’
George Dewberry giggled.
‘George old man, she’s quite serious,’ said Raymond Ball.
The woman slid closer to George Dewberry and wound a long serpentine arm round his neck.
‘Come to bed, Paddy,’ she repeated purposefully.
‘Oh, I couldn’t! I mean, I hardly know you . . .’
The woman was four inches taller than George Dewberry. She stood fully upright and glared down at him with burning, hypnotic eyes.
The others swallowed the remains of their drinks, seized George Dewberry and hurried outside. The woman pursued them.
‘Come to bed, Paddy! Fifty pesetas!’
They ran past the next bar, where the Chief Bosun’s Mate and the Chief G.I. in plain clothes were drinking.
In the third bar they found Maconochie, who was pinned in a corner by a small woman.
‘They all seem to have one track minds in this place,’ said Paul.
‘Dirt track minds, you mean,’ said Raymond Ball.
Maconochie looked up and saw them gazing in at him from the window.
‘Hey, you guys!’ he shouted. ‘Come and give us a hand will you? Quick!’
The rest crowded into the bar. The small woman was ecstatic. She released Maconochie and hurried behind the bar to serve them.
Maconochie was glad to see them.
‘I never thought I’d be pleased to see you lot,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see how I was going to get away without assaulting her and she’d probably have had the police in.’
‘You nearly didn’t see young George here at all. We only just got him out of the last place alive.’
‘She was sort of hypnotic. If she’d gone on saying “Come to bed” in that tone of voice much longer I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.’
‘The moral is don’t come to these places alone.’
‘She wasn’t bad looking actually’ said Raymond Ball. ‘In a reptilian sort of way.’
‘Never mind, come on, men. Let’s try somewhere else. We’re obviously in good company.’
The next bar was also a dance hall. A man and a girl were dancing a form of paso doble in the middle of the floor. It was not the paso doble of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar paso doble was a formal dance executed for the customers. This was the authentic mating dance of man and woman, a wild dance, without inhibitions.
‘Name of a name of a name’ said Paul. ‘Do you see what I see?’
‘It’s Pete Cleghorn’ whispered Raymond Ball in a hushed voice.
As a dancer of repute himself, Raymond Ball was both shocked and envious. He had always thought Peter Cleghorn a particularly dull person and had attributed it to his Pangbourne upbringing. Now he saw him dancing in a manner which, in a British dance hall, would have put him in the hands of the constabulary. Raymond Ball also knew that his own technique might be better but he could never match Peter Cleghorn’s élan.
The party watched in amazement from the door as he whirled his partner, flung back his head, stamped his foot and brought the dance to an end.
‘Ole!’ the room shouted, as Cleghorn led his partner back to a table. ‘Ole! Ole!’
They crossed over and stood around
Peter Cleghorn’s table.
‘Hi fellows!’
‘Pete, I didn’t know you could dance like that!’
‘I didn’t know myself. This is the first time I’ve tried it. I’ve watched about four of the bloody things tonight and I thought I might as well have a go at it. What did you think of it?’
‘Hot stuff, boy. You’d better let The Bodger have a look. That’s right up his street.’
‘Heaven forbid. Have you met Conchita?’
Conchita had black hair and very white teeth and looked about sixteen years of age. She smiled at the cadets round the table but she plainly had no eyes for anyone but this phenomenal Englishman who had out-Spaniarded the Spaniards.
‘We’ll leave you to it’ said Paul.
Raymond Ball was separated from the main party in the next bar. He was much taken with a girl who, until he noticed her, had been sitting by herself and taking no part in the entertainment.
‘I say, Mike, lend me thirty pesetas, will you?’
‘Surely,’ said Michael.
‘Thanks.’
Raymond Ball went over to the girl, who looked up enquiringly.
‘Hello, my dear,’ he said, in his most engaging manner, which made Michael think of the Walrus talking to the Oysters. ‘How about a little bit of je ne sais quoi?’
‘Eighty-five pesetas,’ said the girl briskly.
‘Whatever you say, my dear.’
‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ said Paul. ‘Would you like to take a walk? Let’s go and find our own exibeesh, Mike.’
‘Good idea,’ said Michael.
Towards midnight, the bars and the curtained spaces behind them began to empty. Paul and Michael walked arm in arm up the street back to the frontier, following in the zigzag wake of Maconochie and George Dewberry just ahead.
As they passed the first bar they had visited, they saw the tall woman in the black dress talking to The Bodger.