Good Enough For Nelson

by John Winton

  ‘I keep some tables of figures, sir, listing them by schools, family background, what part of the country they come from, and all that. I’ve also tried to keep some record of their progress when they leave the College, how many drop out, and so on, but of course I haven’t had time really to get much data on that. Maybe it’s a little snobbish of me to be interested in their schools...’

  ‘Not at all.’ The Bodger was vastly interested. ‘After all, we make out a syllabus, the Navy plans its advertising, money is allocated, opinions are formed, jobs are filled, speeches are made in Parliament and decisions made in the Ministry, all based on projections of the type of boy we want. We all have our opinions and everybody always has his say about training, but it seems to me nobody is finding out what sort of bloke we’re actually getting.’

  ‘Well, sir, in statistical terms, my sample is very small, you must understand, and a professional statistician would probably say it was highly dangerous to draw any conclusions from it. But the Navy is a special case, sir, and one must start somewhere, so in statistical terms we can ignore a lot of the variables. If you were doing a survey of white rhinos, sir, it wouldn’t matter what the other coloured rhinos did or what the other animals generally were up to.’

  ‘And we’re dealing with a very rare white rhino?’

  ‘Oh indeed, sir, we’re dealing with young men who not only wanted to join the Navy but actually went ahead and did it. Statistically, they represent a minute proportion of the population. If you included everybody in the Navy, not just OUTs, even they would only represent a proportion of less than one in five hundred of the total population of this country. But one thing leaps out and hits you: there are many less public school boys joining now than there used to be. It’s not a constant downward trend, some years it drops dramatically, others it jumps up again for no particular reason, but steadily, over the years, there’s been an increase of boys from grammar schools, direct grant schools, state secondary schools, and now some from polytechnics and colleges of technology.’

  ‘A very good thing, surely?’

  ‘Well, sir, you’d think so, but the College didn’t always think so,’ said Shiner ruefully. ‘I went to a grammar school myself and I was given quite a rough time when I got here because I didn’t show what they thought was sufficient degree of humility about being an ex-grammar school boy.’

  ‘So what did they do to you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ Shiner smiled, but his face still showed the traces of the pain of it. ‘It was a lot of nonsense, looking back now at it. I used to be what you might call jostled in the throng. Once they locked me in a cupboard so that I missed divisions and was in the Commander’s report. It all worked itself out in the end, especially when I went in for the inter-part boxing and knocked somebody clean out. There was nobody as surprised by that as me, but it seemed to stop all the nonsense dead in its tracks.’

  The Bodger nodded at the truth of Shiner’s story. There always had been an element in the College which would have reacted sharply against Shiner Wright’s peculiar blend of self-confidence and hesitation. Perhaps part of the motive lay in Shiner’s own personality. At any school, in any year, there were always boys whose faces simply called out for something horrible to happen to them behind the fives courts.

  ‘Did you say you’d noted down what parts of the country OUTs came from?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Seventy per cent from the south of England. A few from Scotland, a few from the north, but we’re very largely a home counties Navy, sir.’

  ‘And how many of them are sons of naval officers?’

  Shiner Wright grinned, as though he had been expecting that. ‘That’s what everybody always asks, sir. I think there’s more ignorant nonsense talked about that than anything. The funny thing as that there is no evidence either way. Either that naval officers are not putting their sons forward to join, or that the young men themselves don’t want to serve. As far as I can see the proportion has remained more or less the same over the years. There always has been a certain kind of family, call it a class of family if you like, whose sons have traditionally joined the forces. They’re still there and their sons are still joining. One thing has happened though, sir …’ Shiner Wright’s eyes gleamed with the light of a discoverer of a new truth. ‘There are many more sons of chief petty officers coming to Dartmouth, now. In fact, I would even say more than officers’ sons. Twenty-five years ago it would have been very unusual indeed, and anyone who had joined might have had a more difficult time than I did. But now there are five or six in every entry almost every year. We really do seem to be getting nearer every year to a classless Navy, sir.’

  ‘How many of them would you say were out-and-out working-class?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue, sir. It’s virtually impossible to tell once they get here. I do know that some of them have problems, crises of identity if you like, coming from a working-class background and then having to behave right off the bat like the upper classes.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about the upper classes,’ said The Bodger doubtfully. ‘If anything, the Navy has always been middle-class. Raleigh, Drake, Blake, Benbow’s father was a tanner, the artisian class. Right up to Nelson, the son of a country clergyman. They’ve all been middle-class. Except Rodney, perhaps. What about Max Horton, his old man was a stockbroker. If you read Jane Austen, what’s his name, Sir Walter Elliott, wasn’t at all excited about the idea of an admiral renting his house. He ... I forget how it goes now ... but he thought the Navy was a means of bringing otherwise obscure people of birth into undeserved distinction and ranks their fathers and grandfathers never dreamed about.’

  ‘Honours, sir,’ said Shiner. ‘Honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamed of.’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. From Persuasion. I actually study this sort of thing, sir. It’s one of my hobbies, the changing social status of the naval officer. But it is just a hobby, sir. Frankly I don’t think my research should be taken too seriously. As far as the College and the Navy goes, I’d ignore it.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir.’ Shiner Wright shook his head firmly. ‘Stop all this knife and fork drill or anything like it. Don’t make any concessions to background and jump hard on anybody who does. Treat everybody exactly alike all the time.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I think, too,’ said The Bodger, warmly. ‘And it’s a very old tradition in the Service, too. But what is this crisis of identity people are talking about?’

  ‘It’s the latest in-phrase, sir. In the same way that last year people were saying “good news”. So and so was “good news”, meaning he did his job well, or he was a likable fellow. Anything that went off well was “good news”. Now, everything that goes wrong is called a “crisis of identity”.’

  After The Bodger had gone, Shiner’s divisional chief stretched a long arm into the passageway and arrested the first OUT to pass. It was a Midshipman Coggins. His father was a London costermonger. In his own unsuspecting way, Coggins was a perfect paradigm of what The Bodger and Shiner had been talking about.

  ‘Coggins.’

  ‘Yus, chief,’ said Coggins, in his rich cockney accent.

  ‘DO wants to see yer.’

  ‘Coggins,’ said Shiner, ‘are you suffering from a crisis of identity?’

  ‘No sir?’ said Coggins, trying to see the catch in the question.

  ‘No feelings of social inadequacy, no sensations of excessive social strain in an unusual social situation, no feelings of aggressive superiority to compensate for a socially deprived upbringing, or anything like that at all?’

  ‘Oh no sir,’ said Coggins, wondering what Shiner was getting at. ‘The only thing is ...’

  ‘Yes?’ said the divisional chief, menacingly.

  ‘You never give me time to do all things I gotta do, sir. I never get time to catch meself up.’

  Time, as Coggins said, was an OUT’s most pressing problem. None of them had time
to do all that was required of them, and only the most thoughtful amongst them made enough time to consider what effect the College was having on them. The routine of a Dartmouth term ate up time, like the passages of the watches in a ship at sea, or a monastery’s daily devotions.

  The College day ground round the hours from reveille to early morning activities, to breakfast and after breakfast activities, colours and divisions and prayers, followed by study periods and stand-easy and more studies. After lunch there were sporting and boating activities, and tea and supper and clearing up for rounds and then rounds and finally, after the long day, pipe down. Activity was the watchword, and the only real time for relaxation was generally in the early evening before supper, when there was time for a glass of beer at the main gunroom bar.

  ‘I think it’s important to give yourself time to consider what they’re doing to you here,’ said McAllester one evening, halfway through .the term. He was talking to a midshipman called Blueston, who like Soames had come up from the lower deck but, being much younger and brighter, through a different promotion scheme. ‘However well one does here, it can only be a compromise between what we could do, if we were given enough time, and what we actually do in the time they give us. It’s one of the main reasons I’m longing to pass out of here. Maybe when we get to the fleet we’ll get more chance to impose our own tempo on things. We’ll be able to arrange things better.’

  ‘I doubt that very much,’ said Blueston. ‘You’ll find it even worse when you get to sea properly. You’ll have all sorts of people down on you all the time. I know, it was bad enough for me as an able seaman, but it was twice as bad for the junior officers. I used to watch them getting hell.’

  ‘And yet you applied for a commission?’

  ‘Yes, I needed my head looked at. No, actually, I really am enjoying every minute, it’s a guinea a minute from start to finish.’

  McAllester studied Blueston. He liked and respected him. This man could be a professional rival in years to come. He had a great deal of natural ability and he also had that essential air about him of wanting and expecting to do well.

  ‘The only peculiar thing is, I keep feeling this weird sensation of having a double identity. Part of me is doing what they tell me to do, part of me is up there somewhere looking down, absolutely amazed by it all. We drill just like we used to do at Shotley, tougher if anything, and yet we’re officers. I never dreamed officers had to do drill like this. They shout at us, treat us like dirt, we get all sorts of bloody awful and exhausting things to do, and yet we have mess dinners, when we live like princes. I used to look through the wardroom door when I was a sailor and on mess nights I’d see all that silver and glasses and cutlery all laid out and napkins all folded and to me it was just like Wonderland. And yet here I am, part of it all. It gives me a funny feeling all over, like yesterday, when Shiner Wright was giving us his lecture on divisional duties. Jolly Jack, he says, is a very funny person. Treat him right and you can do anything with him. Properly led and looked after he’ll go anywhere and do anything. Only a short time ago I was Jolly Jack myself! It’s eerie hearing somebody talk about you as you were in your past life.’

  ‘And was what he said accurate?’

  ‘Oh pretty good. Pretty fair. When I was a sailor I never knew the officers were studying us quite so closely. Mind you, we studied them pretty closely, too.’

  For Arthur Soames, there was no more time than for anyone else, and everything was more difficult.

  ‘I just never get time to think these days,’ he said, when he came home, dog tired.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother,’ said Joyce, bitterly.

  ‘Joycie, dear, it’s my job, don’t you see?

  ‘No I don’t see. I hate the Navy. I always have.’

  ‘The only crisis of identity in this place,’ said Caradoc Evans, when he heard the phrase, ‘is in the staff. Do as I say and not as I do, is their motto.’

  The College was the most restless place in the world. It was never really still. There was always activity at any hour of the day, lights burning at any hour of the night. There was always the sound of footsteps in the corridors, engines starting up outside, shouts of command on the parade ground, the helicopter roar overhead, boats putting to sea or returning up river. Somebody was always arriving, and somebody else just leaving, going to sea or coming back from sea, going on a course, or joining to start a new course. At any one time there were always preliminary tests and final examinations, joining routines and farewell runs ashore, speeches of welcome and passing-out parades.

  For The Bodger, the term brought a constant stream of private problems and public appearances, with interminable exchanges with Ministry about the syllabus, about foreign officers, about stewards’ working hours, and garden implements, increase in allowance of, and repairs to the College roofs, and a steady succession of visits, from the press, and from Ministry officials, and from serving officers and from the town, and from parents. Sometimes The Bodger felt like the headmaster of a boarding school for all the world’s western navies, a boarding school which, moreover, ran the risk of closure. Doubts about the future of the College persisted, in spite of all denials. To close Dartmouth would seem tantamount to closing the Bank of England or selling the Albert Hall, but the uneasiness still surfaced very occasionally in a structural improvement inexplicably delayed, or an unguarded remark by an official visitor.

  The Bodger ignored them, and concentrated on overhauling the syllabus, which was astonishingly broad, embracing everything from Spanish to spherical trigonometry and from knots to nuclear propulsion. The entry schemes of officers and their various syllabi had been changed many times in twenty years and each change had left its residue of content within the College, a subject taught here, an extra lecture there, a visit somewhere else, some of which had lost their relevance. Once again, The Bodger found himself holding the ring for a struggle of opinions between those, like Isaiah Nine Smith, who were sure the College was getting too intellectual and the staff, led by the Prof., who complained that the College was daily coming closer to a United States marines’ boot camp.

  In a summer term, College and county events crowded upon each other. There was the Dartmouth town regatta, and the College regatta, and the County Show, and the Training Squadron visit to Dartmouth, and hay-making, and the Cricket Week, and the Town Week, when the College was thrown open to visitors from the town and district. Winter societies such as the debating society and the music appreciation group languished, whilst the summer ones, such as the staff’s open air dining club, the First Fine Day Club, all flourished.

  While the sun shone in one of the hottest and finest summers in living memory, the College term progressed in a series of small individual happenings which combined in retrospect to make up a mosaic of that season’s memories. Hilda’s menu book went into print and the Prof.’s Oedipus RN into rehearsal. The Prof. himself was noticed discreetly dining a deux with an unknown lady in a Dartmoor pub. Lucy went to Bristol to join a protest against the proposed route of a motorway slip road, and afterwards on to the Quantocks to study comparative levitation techniques at the feet of a brand-newly fashionable guru from Assam. Isaiah Nine Smith missed her badly, while saying openly that she must be bonkers. Subramanyandaoshah, a very devout Muslim, complained to Shiner Wright, his divisional officer, that his prayer-mat had been stolen after he had carefully laid it out for his devotions; it transpired that his divisional chief had found it sculling about, as he thought, and impounded it in the divisional scran bag. Cassidy-Jones’s department wrote officially to say that two officers of the Dravidian Navy would be joining in September. The Captain’s Secretary was taken to Devon General to have his adenoids removed. The O’Malley children got chicken-pox. Persimmons began to double round the College again. Polly and Lionel Tinkle were seen driving out of the College gates together in Polly’s car on more than one occasion. More defence cuts were announced and Tremendous Mackenzie took himself off to Leicester Sales to b
uy a beautiful new chestnut hunter of whose dam, he assured The Bodger, it could be said that she was the third cousin twice removed of a grandson of the Derby winner Pinza. Wilhelmina meanwhile continued in training for the great coup daily awaited by Rowbotham’s ship’s company. The College wives took up conversational French classes and Kung fu - ‘conversational kung fu is what they need’, said The Bodger. Bingley scored a century against a touring Free Foresters’ side, and McAllester won the county half-mile championship race at Exeter. Caradoc Evans wrote a masterly seventy stanza awdl in Welsh, satirising the College and all its works, which might have had a considerable succès d’estime had anybody else at the College been able to read Welsh. Smythe-Smith had a brainstorm one evening and took one of the College’s 45-foot glass-fibre-hulled fast powerboats to sea all by himself. It was one of those disciplinary aberrations, a germ of mutiny pressed out by the sheer weight of the College regimen. While the press chased the story, The Bodger awarded seven days stoppage of leave and said no more. Simon Lefroy sent a message, written on a notebook page and thrown over a College wall, to say that he was held hostage in a Students’ Union building in East Anglia, and could The Bodger raise the money and perhaps put it on his mess-bill? Monsignor had to quell a potential uprising in the Starboard Britannia Choir. The Gromboolian members, already growing restive over the imperialist implications of ‘A British tar is a soaring soul’ had flatly refused to learn the words or the time of ‘He might have been an Englishman’.

  ‘What can I do?’ he said to The Bodger. ‘Every song we’ve got has imperial echoes, from “Land of Hope and Glory” to “Boots, boots, boots marching up and down again”.’

  ‘What about “Annie Laurie”?’ said The Bodger.

  ‘That’ll only remind them about Scottish devolution, or something,’ said Monsignor gloomily.