Good Enough For Nelson

by John Winton

  The Bodger looked blank. ‘I’ve heard of upper yard men ...’

  ‘Ah yes sir.’ Soames grinned again. ‘But this is a posher course, sir. So they call us royal yard men.’

  ‘And why are you crossed?

  ‘Cross specialisation, sir. Engineers, upper deck, electricians, supply, we all do the same course here, sir.’

  ‘So you’re going to be an officer, Soames?’

  ‘Well, hope so, sir.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ The Bodger had only just stopped himself saying ‘at last’. He had started the papers himself for Soames, an extremely able young petty officer, to become an officer years ago. For Soames only to have reached his officer’s training courses now meant that there must have been some serious delay. Soames’s career must have met some disciplinary or possibly domestic obstacle.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Soames, and the best of luck.’ The Bodger was already smoothly detaching himself from the situation. ‘Carry on please, Mr Tinkle. And may all your reactionary tigers be paper ones.’

  Outside, The Bodger said, ‘Is he a good lecturer, young Tinkle?’

  ‘Perhaps not as good as he thinks he is,’ said Jimmy. ‘But the Prof. rates him very highly.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him, then?’

  Jimmy mentally saluted The Bodger’s perspicacity. He had forgotten the way The Bodger always paid more attention than he appeared to be doing. ‘The Prof. says that he thinks he n-n-n-needs a w-wife,’ Jimmy had rather a good imitation of the Prof., ‘r-rather b-badly. ‘

  In the next lecture-room, Mr Seamus Rothesay was teaching mathematics, just as he had done at Dartmouth for over forty years, longer even than the Prof. His present class had not been to university. They had not won any scholarships to go to university in due course. They had not been selected by the College to go to university at the Navy’s expense. They were in that sense the last and lowest winnowings of the naval officer entry. These were the sort of ordinary, unexceptionable, loyal boys who used to join in short trousers at thirteen years of age and then in long trousers at eighteen, the sort of young men Dartmouth had always been used to, the sort which The Bodger said were not the salt of the earth, but rather the solid earthy part which the salt was supposed to savour. But Mr Rothesay had never taught anywhere else but at Dartmouth, and for him these were the familiar faces of pupils he had taught all his academic life.

  Mr Rothesay had one passionate interest, which he broached to each new class early in every term, hoping one day to strike some answering fire. So far, he never had. Some men collected stamps, others vintage cars. Some played picquet or bridge, or the Stock Exchange. Seamus Rothesay indulged in mathematical computation. For many years, Mr Rothesay had patiently calculated the value of the mathematical quantity known as Pi, normally represented by the Greek letter of the alphabet π, to a thousand places of decimals.

  ‘Pi,’ Mr Rothesay was saying to his class, ‘as you will know from your school mathematics, is the figure by which the diameter of a circle can be multiplied to obtain the length of the circumference. The circumference of a circle, you will recall, is twice Pi times the radius. The area of a circle, you may also recall, is Pi times the radius squared. The surface area of a sphere is four Pi times the radius squared, the volume of a sphere is four-thirds Pi times the radius cubed. And so on. Now, what is Pi?’

  Mr Rothesay’s sombre gaze ranged over his class, hoping for some kindred spark.

  ‘Twenty-two over seven, sir,’ said a voice from the back.

  Mr Rothesay frowned. ‘That is one way of expressing it,’ he said, in a voice heavy with disapproval. ‘Some people also say it is three point one four one six.’

  Either of these definitions, Mr Rothesay knew, was a monstrous, a grotesque over-simplification, like saying that the Mona Lisa was a portrait of a woman. Pi was something extraordinary, an attempt to express the inexpressible. It was poetic and yet it was the very opposite of poetry, being the indefinable defined in a single hard symbol. Pi was more remote than the furthest star, more inaccessible than King Solomon’s Mines, more beautiful than the Queen of Sheba. Pi spun out to infinity. To Mr Rothesay, all those decimal places spread gloriously across his page, each numeral placed in its strict progression shining like a meteor streaming to the wind, a banner emblazoned with seraphic arms and trophies.

  ‘You may like to know,’ Mr Rothesay said, rather shyly, ‘that I have worked out Pi to one thousand places of decimals. I used the following series...’ Mr Rothesay turned and wrote on the blackboard. The class stared glassy-eyed at the strings of numerals. They had heard that old Rothesay was nutty on Pi, but this was even more overpowering than they had ever guessed.

  ‘Most of you are probably not familiar with this particular progression,’ said Mr. Rothesay, ‘but it may interest you to know that I once discovered that Professor Shanks, an American who worked out Pi to seven hundred and seven places in 1873, had actually made a mistake at the five hundredth place of decimals ...’ Mr Rothesay’s voice rose thrillingly, echoing the joy in that moment of triumph. ‘In 1956, a computer calculated Pi to ten thousand places in approximately thirty-three hours, and I was right in all my thousand places!’

  Without knowing why, the class burst out clapping. They were awed by such dedication, with some inkling of the intellectual perseverance and stamina required to build such a mathematical monument. Nobody thought to ask, what was the point of it? That would have been like asking what was the point of the Eiffel Tower?

  The Bodger, passing down the corridor, saw Mr Rothesay’s name on the door. ‘How is old Rothers? Still trying to work out the square root of sweet Fanny Adams?’

  ‘No, he’s retired from all that,’ said Jimmy. ‘Hung up his boots, or his square roots, or whatever it is mathematicians do. But he still corresponds with some lady in America over some terrific mathematical coup he pulled off at the expense of her great-grandfather years ago.’

  ‘Shall we go in?’

  But Jimmy was looking at his watch again. Even as a cadet, The Bodger recalled, Jimmy had been obsessed by time. He was a methodical man, and like many naval officers, like many schoolmasters and hospital staff, he lived in accordance with a mental time-table.

  ‘It’s coming up to stand-easy time,’ Jimmy said, in exactly the tone of voice a schoolmaster might say ‘there’s the bell for prep’.

  The College wardroom anteroom had probably changed in appearance since The Bodger’s last visit, although he would have been hard put to it to explain how. The bar might be in a different place. The coffee urn was certainly new. There was an unfamiliar pattern of cup and saucer. Some of the pictures had been changed, or at least changed round. Possibly, though The Bodger could not be sure, the colour of the curtains and wallpaper was different. But nothing really important had changed. An intensely sociable and clubbable man, The Bodger had always loved wardroom life. It gave him a familiar pleasure to revisit it, although as the Captain he could never now enter except as a guest, by invitation of the President of the Mess. The modern Navy had weakened the peculiar intimacy of wardroom existence; earlier marriages, fewer foreign commissions of any length, higher pay, and more officers owning and living in their own homes, had all diluted the unique flavour of wardroom life. There were now far fewer of those bachelor officers, in their twenties, thirties, some even in their forties, who had really run the wardroom, and the ship. Wardroom existence had made such men abnormally conservative, insular and resistant to change, and uninterested in politics, or art, or sport, other than Service sport. It had led to largely monastic lives and narrow minds, but, in The Bodger’s opinion, it had been very good for the Service. But still, this wardroom was a kind of home to The Bodger, just as every wardroom was home, and he was delighted to be back.

  Even the faces were strange, and yet so familiar. They all came up singly, or in couples, or in groups of three or four at Jimmy’s nod, the divisional officers, and the lecturers in various subjects, and the t
echnical officers, and heads of College departments, and the padre and the civilian officers. The word had gone round, like a fiery cross, that the new Captain would be in the anteroom at stand-easy and anyone who could should take the chance of meeting him informally. This was, so to speak, the first move in supercession, like showing the new chieftain to the elders of the tribe.

  The Commander of the College himself was away, having a wisdom tooth extracted, and many of the introductions were done by the Commander (Training) whose face The Bodger recognised at once, over the gulf of the years, as one of the cadets he had had charge of in the old training cruiser Barsetshire years before. His name was Isaiah Nine Smith and The Bodger remembered him as a shy, withdrawn, intense young man who had gone about his work in the training cruiser with a zeal which had been faintly terrifying. Now he was a Commander and, by one of the ironies of the Service, The Bodger’s close colleague. He was a different generation altogether to The Bodger and although they would both still be able to count on certain basic assumptions about themselves, the College and the Navy, they would otherwise have to bridge a great gap of experience, age and temperament. Isaiah Nine Smith might have been ill at ease meeting his old Cadet Training Officer in such altered circumstances, but The Bodger was glad to see he was not. The Bodger realised that he knew almost nothing about the man, just as the boy had been a mystery in Barsetshire.

  ‘Are you married, Ikey? Got a wife down here?’

  ‘No, sir, I’m not married.’

  He said it with a dismissive shrug, not deprecatingly, shyly or awkwardly. The Bodger began to recognise the signs of a flyer, someone who was going to rise in the Service: the general air of confidence, the quick appraisal of chances, the readiness to decide, the ability to weigh up others and assess their capabilities. In conversation The Bodger gently tried to sound the man out, to search for weakness, for prejudices. He must have some. But The Bodger could only find one welcome point of agreement. Ike was as determined as The Bodger to abolish Spicer’s lectures.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t taken action before, sir, but of course ...’ Isaiah Nine Smith looked meaningfully at The Bodger, ‘one has to bear in mind a certain weight of College tradition. I think at one time they might have been of some practical use but I think they’ve now degenerated into almost a parody of themselves. Although, heaven knows, one can’t assume these days, sir, that the midshipman know all the things we were always assumed to know.’

  ‘Is that a problem now?’

  ‘Very much so, sir. It really is getting to the state where nobody on the staff can take anything at all for granted. You can be pretty sure they can read and write, or they wouldn’t have passed the exam, and you can assume that they can speak intelligible English, or they wouldn’t have passed the interview-but you can’t even assume that with some of the Gromboolians.’

  ‘You mean some of the Gromboolian navies are sending us some of their hard cases?’

  ‘Oh no, not at all, sir!’ Isaiah Nine Smith looked genuinely shocked. ‘Not at all! In fact, quite the very opposite, sir. Some of them are sent to Dartmouth as rewards, for having done so well in their own training set-ups back home. Only the very best come. But, as I said, they may have done well at home, but in some cases, not all by any means, their English hasn’t quite kept up. And we do have to make allowances. We sometimes run a small special course. The Prof. normally takes them himself.’

  The Bodger mentally stored the information, as one more example of the Prof.’s services to the College.

  ‘But to get back to what I was saying, sir...’ Isaiah Nine Smith had the conversational tenacity of the good committee man. ‘We can assume they can read and write and speak English, but that’s all. Nothing else. We get all types, all classes, all political and religious views, we’re constantly amazed at what the midshipmen nowadays know and what they don’t know. You get the occasional one who has never used a napkin and drinks his finger bowl and eats his peas off his knife ...’

  ‘Have you ever actually done that?’

  ‘No, sir, to be honest, I can’t say I’ve ever tried.’

  ‘According to Mr Spicer, it’s bloody difficult.’

  ‘He should know, sir. But as I was saying, sir, one winter term you might find that nobody can play rugger. None of them ever heard of it. Yet the next summer, by sod’s law, you get half the London Scottish team. We also get lads who have run their father’s undertakers business for the last two years, or played three seasons in professional rep. as a spear-carrier, or someone who’s conducted guided tours to Katmandu. The old cannabis trail, he called it. You never know. We’ve got a bloke now who’s made his own hovercraft, speaks three languages and spends part of his leave working in a remedial home for handicapped children.’

  ‘Hell’s teeth, that sounds too good to be true. Who’s that?’

  ‘Chap called McAllester, sir.’

  ‘Ah.’ The Bodger now knew, from experience, that McAllester was bound to rise in the Navy. The main difficulty in the Service had always been that of getting oneself known, without actually getting one’s name in the papers. Here was a young man who had come twice to the Captain of the College’s attention before the Captain had been in the College half a dogwatch. Both occasions had been unschemed and unplanned. Luck was an essential quality for a successful naval officer, as The Bodger knew better than anybody.

  ‘The thing is, we get such a wide selection now, sir. The ordinary common-or-garden hewer of wood and drawer of water, your ordinary actual Dartmouth bloke, who used to join at thirteen in short trousers in your day and in long trousers at eighteen with me, he’s a very rare fish indeed now, sir. Very much in the minority. If you look at the composition of the divisions, you will see that besides the Gromboolians...’

  ‘What percentage are they, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know precisely, sir. I could work it out, but offhand, and fairly accurately, I would say about one in ten.’

  ‘As much as that?’

  ‘Good God, sir, if the Gromboolian navies had their way it would be a hundred per cent! They love it. Lap it up. They queue up to send their bods here. But, of course, if you allowed the percentage to creep up above a certain figure then the very Dartmouth atmosphere they want and are paying for would disappear. Like a place that was all tourists and nobody living there, the very people that the tourists have paid to see. We’re training some of these officers to man ships we can’t afford ourselves now and operate gear we designed but haven’t the money to put in our own ships. I think it’s happening all over the Navy now, sir. In a way we’re now like somebody who has had to sell his own estate and can’t afford to keep up his own shoot, but goes on designing guns and training keepers and gun-dogs for other people who can still afford to shoot.’

  The Bodger was beginning to admire Isaiah Nine Smith’s fluency. This, he recognised, was a vital man. Ikey could be The Bodger’s hot line into the College’s moods.

  ‘But as I was saying, sir...’ Once again Isaiah Nine Smith came remorselessly back to his point. ‘If you look at any collection of OUTs out there, you’ll see the Gromboolians, but not only them, but padres and Royal Marines and upperyard men, or royal yard men as they call them now, supplementary list officers and schoolies and doctors and aircrew officers and failed aircrew officers who are trying to requalify for something else. We take everybody on now, sir, like Eskimo Nell. Then there are blokes who are just about to go to university and blokes who’ve just been to university, and blokes who are at university, coming here to do their training in their vacations. We already have the nursing officers doing their training and I’ve no doubt we shall all wake up one morning and find the place moving with Wrens. I think it is rather splendid that everybody, everybody, should come to the same place to do their first basic training. All get their first encounter with the Navy at the same place and in the same way. But frankly, I think we have just about reached the limits of variety. We must be operating now just about at our limits.’
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  That phrase ‘at our limits’ occurred again and again, as The Bodger went round the College. Everybody warmly and sincerely assured him they were now operating at their limits.

  ‘Of course, we’re operating just about at our limits here, sir,’ said the College helicopter flight commander, a very short, very tubby lieutenant commander with a bright red beard who, for some reason, was always called Buster. ‘Everybody has to take a two-day helo winching acquaint course and frankly, we’re pushed to get ‘em all in.’

  The Bodger had been watching a class, dressed in flying overalls and helmets, practising being winched up and down from a hovering helicopter. Each member of the class in turn stood underneath while the helicopter lowered a strop, like a giant padded hangman’s noose, down to him. He put the strop over his shoulders and under his armpits and then stood to attention. The wire tautened and drew him upwards towards the open helicopter doorway. After being hauled up just far enough to be able to swing and smash the bridge of his nose against the lower door sill coaming, each man was then rapidly lowered to earth again. With the roaring of the helicopter engine, the mighty rushing of winds from its rotors, and the mental associations of rescue and disaster when seeing a man dangling upon the strop, it was as exciting as watching the fire brigade at work.

  ‘Just about at our limits, sir,’ said Buster again. ‘But of course, it is much better that they all do helo winching for the first time out here on a nice sunny day at Dartmouth than on the casing of a submarine, say, in the dark, freezing cold, and blowing a gale somewhere north of the Arctic circle.’ Buster’s voice, expressions and gestures vividly pantomimed just how dark, freezing and generally uncomfortable and hazardous that experience was likely to be.

  ‘Must be,’ said The Bodger.

  ’Of course,’ said the College Bosun, who remembered The Bodger from his last time at the College, ‘we’re working right up to our limits here, you know, Bodger. The rate they bash the boats up, we’re pushed to get enough out on the river every day.’