Good Enough For Nelson

by John Winton

  ‘And this chap was p-pretty pleased with himself over the fact that he had three balls and he used to stop people in the street, complete strangers, in the street, and t-tell them about it. One day he stopped a bloke-have you heard this one?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Julia said.

  ‘Well, this fellow, that’s the fellow with three balls, said to the other fellow, the one he had just stopped, and he said, do you realise, he said, that between us we’ve got five balls? And the other chap looked at him in amazement and said...’ Mellard assumed a high shrieking falsetto voice. ‘... Blimey, mate, you must have a cluster! ‘

  ‘Gracious,’ said Julia. The Bodger moved on. Telling unsuitable stories to senior officers’ wives was part of growing up. The Bodger had done it himself, in his time.

  Encouraged, Mellard said, ‘Have you heard the one about the chap who went to a fancy dress ball dressed up as a petrol pump?’

  ‘I believe I have, actually,’ Julia said, ‘So will you excuse me, please?’ Julia passed onwards, raising her eyebrows expressively at The Bodger as she went.

  ‘Oh sure,’ Mellard said, equably, already measuring the distance between himself and Purvis’s decanter and estimating his chances.

  Lionel Tinkle despised The Bodger’s bourgeois PC evenings with all his heart and with all his soul. But, he had realised that Polly was regularly to be seen at them and he had let it be known, most casually, that he would not object to an invitation, some evening, some time, it did not matter when. After some twenty minutes’ careful manouevring, observed by Polly out of the corner of her eye, progressing towards her in a series of oblique slanting movements through the crush, he had arrived at her side.

  ‘Of course,’ he was saying, largely, about politics, ‘the Navy is based upon a fundamental anomaly. It’s almost comical, in a way. It postulates the use of force in a civilised manner. But that’s a contradiction in terms. You can’t apply force in a civilised manner! It’s not possible!’

  ‘That’s more or less what my father is always saying,’ said Polly.

  Lionel Tinkle paused, disconcerted. ‘Was your father in the Navy?’

  ‘Oh yes, he was. Well, he still is. He’s an admiral.’

  ‘Serving?’

  ‘Oh yes, still serving.’

  ‘And he says the Navy is largely an anomaly?’ said Lionel Tinkle, incredulously.

  ’Goodness yes. He’s always going on about it. No thinking man would support the use of force in such a way for one minute, Daddy says. The moment I see that everybody else is genuinely giving it up and laying down their arms I’ll be only too happy to hang up me boots and retire, Daddy says. He say that only a lunatic would ever join the Navy anyway, and go to sea when he could stay at home and dig his garden instead. No wonder it was always the fool of the family who joined the Navy, Daddy says. You could have all night in, every night, sleep with your wife, see your children growing up, enjoy home cooking. Anyone who joins the Navy and misses all that needs his tiny bumps read, Daddy says.’

  Lionel Tinkle swallowed his rich tawny wine so quickly it brought tears of real agony brimming to his eyes.

  ‘Quite apart from all that, Daddy says,’ Polly went on, ‘there’s all the expense. You could get mercenaries to do the same job and you wouldn’t even have to buy their weekly insurance stamps either, Daddy says.’

  ‘You couldn’t have gained an empire with mercenaries.’

  ‘Yes, you could. The Roman army was almost entirely mercenary. Anyway, Daddy always says the Empire was the daftest thing since mixed bathing. We could easily have traded with all those countries without making them into an empire. You don’t have to take over the shoe shop before you can buy and sell shoes, Daddy says.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Lionel Tinkle, speaking very carefully, as though still hearing confusing noises ringing in his ears. ‘I wouldn’t exactly agree with that. Far be it from me to argue the case for imperialism ...’

  ‘Far be it indeed,’ murmured Polly.

  ‘Do you know, I really don’t know whether you’re pulling my leg or not?’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Polly.

  ‘Would you like to come and have a meal with me, now, this evening, after all this is over?’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  ‘Would you really?’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  By some oversight on both their parts, Hilda and Seamus Rothesay were talking to each other.

  ‘Somebody was telling me you were an expert on pies?’ Hilda was saying, as though unsure herself that such an unlikely proposition could possibly be true. Before Seamus Rothesay, already becoming aware of a deep-seated misunderstanding, could say anything, Hilda went on, ‘I’ll tell you why I’m asking. I’m compiling this book of recipes, you see, from the College, to publish and sell for charity. There’s no reason why it should be recipes only from wives. Anybody can contribute. Do you have a special way of doing them?’

  Seamus Rothesay considered briefly but quailed before the prospect of trying to ascend such an Eiger face of misapprehensions. But he had to say something, so he said, ‘You start on a series, you see.’

  ‘A series of ingredients, you mean?’

  ‘You could call them that, I suppose,’ said Seamus Rothesay hopelessly. ‘It’s a numerical progression of numbers. You arrange them in a special way, carrying on your calculation from one set to the next, modifying your estimate of the final result as you achieve more and more figures, approximating closer and closer to the final result...’ Seamus Rothesay’s voice trailed away.

  ‘Golly.’ Hilda had jerked her head back sharply, while briefly shutting her eyes. ‘It sounds a jolly complicated sort of recipe to me!’

  Seamus Rothesay gently tried to make Hilda aware of her misunderstanding. ‘I remember once,’ he said, ‘telling a particularly dim cadet, those were in the days when we still had cadets here ...’

  ‘Yes I know what you mean by cadets,’ said Hilda sharply.

  ‘He quite brought the house down with one remark. I told him the common definition of Pi, greatly simplified of course, and he was most indignant. Trust the Admiralty, he said, trust the Admiralty to think of such a difficult number as that!’ Seamus Rothesay could still chuckle at the faint resonances remaining in his ancient, faded joke. Even Hilda was now aware of the misunderstanding, although she could not begin to grasp what it was.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, brusquely.

  ‘Of course,’ said Seamus Rothesay softly, ‘you must go and see a man about a menu.’

  Soames was talking to Joyce, and trying to talk to somebody else.

  ‘Don’t you leave me, Alfred!’ Joyce gripped his arm, like a non-swimmer gripping a swimming pool rail. ‘With all these people.’

  ‘We’re supposed to talk to other people, Joyce. It’s part of it, don’t you see?’

  ‘Don’t you leave me!’

  ‘All right.’ They both looked at each other, silent, and angry. Lucy, in the manner of young women, had summed up all the young men there, and was talking to Isaiah Nine Smith.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘why did you cancel all the goings-on the moor that day?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ said Isaiah Nine Smith, studying her long straight black hair, her beads, her rough wool sweater, her jeans tucked into calf-length shiny black boots.

  ‘Well, it didn’t match up to your stem, warlike image, in your dashing flying helmet descending out of the sky all the time.’

  ‘I’m surprised you noticed me.’

  ‘You were rather obvious. Ostentatious, almost. Was it anything to do with us being there?’

  ‘Good Heavens, no. Why were you there, anyway?’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious, too. We were objecting to the use of a natural beauty spot for weapon training. We think it’s a kind of sacrilege.’

  ‘Well, for a start, it isn’t a natural beauty spot, it’s a bloody awful place and nobody in their right mind would go there from choice. But we have t
o train somewhere.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That helicopter you were so energetically trying to make go away, do you realise that was the same one that came back and rescued your chum? Don’t you think that’s a bit ironic?’

  ‘In a way, yes. But we wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for you and exercises.’

  ‘Talking of exercises, somebody was telling me you go in for yoga and Zen Buddhism and transcendental meditation and all that. Is that where they make you take up all sorts of strange positions?’

  ‘Sometimes. You still haven’t explained why you cancelled it all?’

  ‘I cancelled it because there comes a time when there is nothing to be gained by going on. There comes a time when you can see that everybody has had enough and more than enough.’

  ‘But surely, that’s what being in the Navy is all about, going on after everybody has had enough and more than enough?’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Isaiah Nine Smith’s face showed that he was hit, and hit hard.

  ‘My father. He was in the Navy. He wrote something like that in a letter to my mother once, before they were married. He died when I was two. And before you ask, my mother’s dead too. I’m the original orphan Annie. So why did you cancel it?’

  ‘God, you don’t let go, do you? I thought we’d made our point. The weather was foul and was getting worse. One chap had sprained his ankle quite badly and all the teams were having problems of various kinds. Even the staff, as it turns out, were having serious trouble. Did you ever have any experience of drugs?’ Desperately, Isaiah Nine Smith sought to change the subject. ‘Personally, I mean?’

  ‘I did try a few puffs of cannabis once, in somebody’s flat. I just felt a bit funny, that’s all.’

  ‘I just wondered, because we do lecture to the OUTs on drugs and I sometimes wonder whether what we say has any relation at all to what actually happens. I often suspect they ought to be lecturing us on drugs.’

  ‘I’m still curious about your motives in having these exercises out there. I can’t see what you hope to achieve. You know everybody’s fit, everybody’s always tremendously fit here. Why do you have to do it, and why do you have to do it on Dartmoor?”

  ‘I should have thought your father would have answered that for you.’

  ‘Do you get fulfilment out of it?’

  ‘Do you get fulfilment out of your exercises?’

  ‘It’s a way of life.’

  ‘So is ours, a way of life.’

  ‘A way of death, you mean.’

  ‘Tell you what, after this is all over, would you come and have...’

  ‘There you are Ikey!’ It was Debby Jerningham, dragging after her a smaller, blonder version of herself. ‘Been looking for you. Penny, this is Ikey. Ike this is Penny, my cousin. She and I used to run a cookery business together. I used to do the cooking, Penny used to chat up the customers. She simply adores naval officers.’

  ‘What, on toast, do you mean?’ said Isaiah Nine Smith weakly.

  ‘What very strange Christian names you have,’ said Penny. ‘Well,’ said Isaiah Nine Smith, conscious that Lucy too was listening closely. ‘My parents were Plymouth Brethren. Very devout. They named me after a text in Isaiah. All about Unto us a son is born, unto us a child is given. It comes from Isaiah, chapter nine. So, Isaiah Nine.’

  ‘How sweet! ‘

  ‘I suppose I was lucky not to be called Wonderful, Counsellor. Because that’s how the verse goes on, his name shall be wonderful counsellor. WC Smith I should have been.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Penny, ‘our paths have crossed before!’ Penny, it transpired, had an encyclopaedic memory for faces, names places and occasions. She led them through the Court Circular, sections of the Navy List and Kelly’s Directory, the MCC fixture list, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition catalogue, British Rail time-tables, Pan American scheduled flights to New York, by way of Wimbledon, Wisden, Wisley, Bisley, Burleigh, Hurlingham, Henley, Farnborough, Shugborough, Braemar and Tamar, and finally back to Dartmouth, satisfied that she had at last established that Isaiah Nine Smith had once received an invitation to one of her flatmate’s weddings in Guildford but had not been able to attend. Breathlessly she moved away and Isaiah Nine Smith turned back to Lucy.

  ‘As I was saying...’

  ‘Ikey!’ It was Hilda, with her unmarried second cousin from Wigtownshire, who bred and talked about Cavalier King Charles spaniels. ‘They’re allowed anywhere, you know,’ she said reverently. ‘It’s the law, you can’t stop them. It’s because of King Charles, you see.’

  ‘Let me try again...’ Isaiah Nine Smith said to Lucy. But then it was June, the short-story writer, with another unmarried writing friend from Totnes, who talked about her uncle’s last illness. Then The Bodger laid a firm hand on Isaiah Nine Smith’s shoulder. ‘I’ve got a prospective parent here, who needs a bit of reassuring. Come and keep her morale up by talking about what we do here. Remember to tell her we’re a compassionate society nowadays. We don’t often have floggings these days, and not many people get keel-hauled in the course of the average commission.’

  ‘Coming right away, sir. Lucy, would you like to have a meal with me after this?’

  ‘Provided you don’t talk about Zen Buddhism and meditational positions.’

  ‘OK, provided you don’t talk about the Navy and Dartmoor and all that.’

  ‘OK then.’

  ‘OK.’

  The Bodger was talking to an instructor lieutenant commander known to everybody at the College as Beaky; he was a lecturer in naval history and political theory, and June’s husband. ‘To use a horrible trendy phrase, sir,’ Beaky was saying, ‘I quite often experience a crisis of identity these days.’

  Beaky, who had been the Schoolie in the old Superb, would never be promoted and he knew it. He did not resent his wife’s success which he did not feel diminished him. He was not an ambitious man and he often reassured himself that being passed over had not hurt him. But now and again he did feel the twinges of longing for what might have been, like the prickling ache of a long-amputated limb.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder, am I a naval officer or a schoolmaster? Because I ought to be able to be both. I teach an academic subject in a properly academic way, I hope, and yet I’m looking forward and backwards over my shoulder all the time at what the Service requires. It is impossible to be in the Navy and to ignore its effects on one as a scholar. I like to think of myself as being a scholar still at heart. But it seems impossible to be a naval scholar. The Service is all-pervasive and I’m very much afraid all-powerful, all-conquering. Whenever I give way just the least bit, the Navy quietly flows in and fills up the space. And I never get that space back, hard though I try and push. I used to have one or two pet research subjects. I have not worked on them for years. I used to correspond with one or two people I was up at Cambridge with. Not now.’

  As always when he talked to Beaky, The Bodger had the idea that Beaky was saying something very profound but he could never understand what it was.

  ‘Here am I, sir, preaching an upper-class, elitist way of life and gospel, in which incidentally I sincerely believe and which I support whole-heartedly, to young men who are more orientated to a lower-middle-class or even working-class ethos. Sometimes they look at me as though I’m talking Hottentot. Yet we must be elitist. There never was a time when we ought to scrap our present line of advertising which gives the impression that what we want is a new class of officers who are like socially presentable bureaucrats with a taste for occasional helicopter flying. I think we ought to advertise for boys whose fathers were naval officers. Join the family firm, we ought to be saying. I really do, sir, quite honestly, I do. We’ve gone too far the other way. One lad was telling me the other day that his schools careers’ master warned him that when he went up for the Admiralty Interview board he should not on any account volunteer the fact that his father was a naval officer. If it cropped up in conversation, he was to play the subject down. It would
be no help at all, and probably a disadvantage, he was told. Talk about a crisis of identity. That poor chap doesn’t know who he is or whether he’s coming or going. He is his father’s son. He can’t help it, and yet he is not supposed to acknowledge it.’

  ‘Who was that? Do you mind telling me?’

  ‘Chap called Persimmons, sir. He’s a good little lad but I think he’s rather finding the College a bit much for him. But to go on with my point. In the old days there was a place for everybody and everybody or almost everybody was in his place. Nowadays, you get a working-class lad coming here, to what must be, externally anyway, one of the last bastions of privilege left in England, with a steward to clean up his cabin and stewards to serve him his meals. No wonder he blows his top a bit. He either becomes aggressively working-class, stressing his accent and his background and asking, for instance, where’s the bath so that he can put his coal in it...’

  ‘Has anybody actually asked that?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, some Welsh midshipman. As I say, sir, he either becomes aggressively working-class or he becomes excessively upper-class, cultivating a far-back accent...’

  ‘A what accent?’

  ‘Far-back, sir. It’s their word for the way you and I speak, sir.’

  ‘Good God! ‘

  As usual, The Bodger was left with the impression that Beaky had been saying something important, although he could not remember what it was. However, his phrase ‘a crisis of identity’ stuck, and it came up again the next day, when as The Bodger said, history was made: the first lecture on how to appear on television was given at the Britannia Royal Naval College.

  Amazingly, on The Bodger’s enquiries, it turned out there was indeed a department in the Ministry of Defence which dealt with what was termed ‘media presentation’. It seemed that nobody, before The Bodger, had ever heard of them or telephoned them or got in touch with them in any way; they were therefore surprised, and delighted, and flattered, and promised to send down their media consultant, and his presentation team.