by David Niven
Before I returned to Sandhurst for my last term and final exams, I spent what was to be my last holiday at Bembridge. The whole family, minus Tommy, was there. My mother, whom I had finally grown to love and to appreciate, presided over the gathering. ‘Max’ was back from India, having become disenchanted with soldiering. He had resigned his commission and gone to work as the Starter on the Bombay Race Course. This, too, had palled and his adventurous spirit had taken him to Australia, where for the past five years he had been working as a jackaroo (cowboy) on a cattle station new Yarra Weir. Now he was having a last long look at England before sailing away to take a job as manager of a banana plantation on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific. Looking back on that period, I now realise that at eighteen I must, by today’s standards, have been a very square member of a very square group. There seems to have been the minimum of rebellion against the Establishment. There was mass unemployment; conditions in the mines and shipyards were appalling. There were hunger marches and general strikes but my generation of students remained shamefully aloof. We did little or nothing in protest. Perhaps we were still very much in shock from realising that the cream of the generation immediately before ours had been wiped out. Perhaps there was no one left worth rebelling against and in my case, discipline was being pumped and bashed into me to such an extent that any sort of organised student revolt against authority, such as has now become the norm, was unthinkable. We drank a great deal, it is true, but we were immensely physically fit. Pot, speed, hashish and L.S.D. were as yet unheard of so instead of sitting around looking inwards, we rushed about noisily and happily extroverted.
My final term at Sandhurst was a breeze. I had never had it so good. By now promoted to Under-Officer, I was also for the second season running a rugger blue and even found time to produce a couple of concerts and to play the juvenile lead in The Speckled Band. I had also discovered girls in a big way and although Nessie might with certain justification have been called ‘the head mistress’. I had a heart like a hotel with every room booked.
Nessie, as always describing herself as ‘an ‘ore wiv an ‘eart of fuckin’ gold’, was staying with a gentleman friend on a yacht for Cowes week but managed a few clandestine meetings with me in Seaview. She was still the same, as funny and forthright and as beautiful as ever and, as always, most solicitous as to my sexual wellbeing. ‘Gettin’ plenty, dear?’ When I sat for the final exams I discovered with pleasure mixed with surprise that they came quite easily to me and as I had also accumulated a very nice bonus of marks for being an Under-Officer, my entry into the Argylls seemed purely a formality. Everything in the garden was beautiful—a fatal situation for me.
Just before the end of term, all cadets who were graduating were given a War Office form to fill in:
‘Name in order of preference three regiments into which you desire to be commissioned.’
I wrote as follows:
1. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
2. The Black Watch
and then for some reason which I never fully understood, possibly because it was the only one of the six Highland Regiments that wore trews instead of the kilt, I wrote:
3. Anything but the Highland Light Infantry.
Somebody at the War Office was funnier than I was and I was promptly commissioned into the Highland Light Infantry.
∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧
FIVE
I cushioned my mother from the blow of my not being commissioned into the Argylls by a lot of military doubletalk about vacancies and people with short service commissions coming from the universities and I told her, with truth, that anyway the H.L.I. was a much older Highland regiment than the Argylls and persuaded her with a big, black lie that, also, I much preferred being sent to Malta instead of to Bermuda.
I had, however, a sizeable problem explaining to her, when I displayed my uniform, why I was wearing ‘those funny striped trousers instead of a kilt’. After reading up the regimental history of the Argylls for eighteen months I was woefully short of material about the H.L.I., but I did remember hearing that this, the second oldest Highland regiment, had so distinguished itself at some point in its history that the men of the regiment were paid the supreme compliment of being allowed to dress like the officers in the other Highland regiments—in trews—the kilt being, they were told, the symbol of serfdom. An unlikely story, I always felt, particularly since the H.L.I. insisted in wearing white spats with their trews to make quite sure that nobody confused them with the Lowland regiments, and a campaign to be allowed to wear the kilt was always simmering on the regimental hob. It finally came to the boil soon after I joined and the kilt was restored to us.
Nessie accompanied me to various pompous tailors and bootmakers in London while I was being outfitted and eyebrows flew up and down like lifts at some of her observations.
‘Don’t like that fuckin’ black bonnet at all, dear. Makes you look like a bleedin’ judge’andin’ out the death sentence.’
‘Better not sit down in them tight trousers, dear, or you’ll be singin’ alto in the fuckin’ choir.’
When one considers that the most expensive tailors in London at that time charged only fourteen guineas for a suit, it must have come as a body-blow to my mother to receive bills for C250 for tropical clothes all ‘suggested’ in a list provided by the Adjutant. Salt was doubtless rubbed into my poor mother’s financial wound when I handed over my ‘clothing grant’ from a grateful Government—C50.
Nessie took me in uniform to a photographer in Piccadilly called ‘Cannons of Hollywood’ and had me preserved for posterity. She, also insisted on coming to see me off at Tilbury Docks on a bleak, January morning when I embarked in the Kaisar-i-Hind for Malta, two months before my nineteenth birthday. At the last moment, my mother, who had been suffering one of her increasingly frequent bouts of what the family called ‘Mum’s pain’, decided to get out of bed and come too.
‘Don’t worry about me, dear,’ said Nessie when I told her, ‘I won’t embarrass your mum, I’ll hide behind a fuckin’ packin’ case or somefink, I just want to wave goodbye, that’s all.’
In the event it was my spats that brought them together. I put on my outfit, Glengarry, cut-away short khaki jacket with one ‘pip’ on the shoulders, McKenzie tartan trews and my mother took me, with a mound of tin mothproof uniform cases, in a taxi to the docks. Far from hiding behind a packing case, Nessie was very much in evidence standing by the barrier wearing a little beret over her fair hair and a very short white tightly belted raincoat that took nothing away from her fabulous figure and long slim legs. She was doing a very poor job of pretending not to look in my direction; she looked ravishing and I realised with a lurch of the heart just how much I was going to miss her. As my mother and I walked towards the barrier, a noise like castanets came from the region of my shoes. A few heads turned in our direction and suddenly Nessie doubled up with laughter. ‘Christ, yer fuckin’ spats are on the wrong feet.’ My mother caught Nessie’s laughter and I caught hers and in the ensuing hysteria, I introduced one to the other. My mother’s famous disdain for punctuality had already brought our arrival at the docks perilously close to sailing time so with Nessie in tow we barely had time to inspect the cabin which the aforesaid grateful Government had arranged that I share with three others before the booming gong and a cry of ‘all visitors ashore please’ sent them both scurrying back down the gangplank. I have always been embarrassed by long drawn out farewells: once I have got to the point of departure—like an operation—I want to get the damn thing over. We had all agreed that there would be none of that business of smiling bravely and waving while swearing dock-hands wrestled with gangplanks so the last I saw of them was walking away through the damp, dreary Customs Shed. Nessie was holding my mother’s arm.
The ship was filled mostly with Service families heading for Egypt, India and the Far East.
‘Posh’—I soon learned the origin of the word: Port Out Starboard Home, and it summed up the sub
urban snobbery of my shipmates whose supreme status symbol was a cabin on the shady side of the ship. Although civilian clothes were worn aboard, rank was still strictly observed, and if the Navy tended to feel superior to the Army both turned up their noses at the Air Force and all combined to ignore the few civilians. The wives were the worst and in the prevailing atmosphere I clung like a drowning man to a very attractive Jewish couple who nobody spoke to and who had misguidedly booked passage to Alexandria.
One wonders what sort of welcome they would receive there today but at that time Mr. and Mrs. Marks were a boon and a blessing. On the voyage they invited me to sit at their table and took me with them when we went ashore at Marseilles. We spent the day at Arles where I was initiated into the glories of the art galleries and the Roman amphitheatre.
There was one other officer on board from my own regiment. I had spotted him from his uniform on the dock and I knew that he had also identified me for the same reason, but he chose not to speak to me until the day we arrived at Malta. It was a pretty ridiculous situation because between us we represented fifteen per cent of the total complement of officers in the 1st Battalion, the Highland Light Infantry, and would presumably be living cheek by jowl for the forseeable future—but for ten days on a smallish ship he preferred to avoid me. This behaviour later turned out to be typical of a large percentage of my brother officers but I was in no position to argue about it and I had a nasty cold feeling that the comedian at the War Office might have passed on the happy news of my three choices of regiment. The Kaisar-i-Hind dropped anchor in the deep blue Grand Harbour of Valletta just as the sun was setting and it was an unforgettable sight, tier upon tier of honey-coloured houses rising on one side and Fort Ricasoli, built in 1400 by the Knights of Malta, brooding benevolently on the other. In between lay the leviathans of the greatest navy in the world. ‘Retreat’ was being sounded by the massed bands of the Royal Marines on the Flight Deck of the giant carrier Eagle whilst astern of her lay three more—Furious, Argus and Ark Royal.
Ahead there was a line of huge battleships and beyond them again, the tall rather old–fashioned looking county class cruisers. The harbour was filled with three giants and their escorts, the light cruiser squadrons, the destroyer and submarine flotillas, with their mother ships and oilers and the battered old target ship Centurion. Pinnaces, Admirals’ barges and shore boats slashed the blue water with white as they, fussily dashed about on their errands leaving hordes of gaily coloured local dghajjes with their lowly civilian passengers humbly bobbing about in their wake.
As the final plaintive notes of the Retreat floated out from Eagle, the sinking sun kissed the topmost houses and churches of Valletta with gold and all over the Grand Harbour as the signal lights winked from a hundred mastheads, the White Ensign and Union Jacks of the Royal Navy were lowered, rolled up—and put reverently away for the night. If my vintage at Sandhurst was to be decimated in the war that the Germans were to unleash ten years later, it is even more horrifying to speculate on the fate of those magnificent ships and their ships’ companies that I glimpsed for the first time on that balmy evening.
Captain Henry Hawkins had been a trooper in the Life Guards but through a combination of bravery and efficiency, he had been commissioned from the ranks and was now Adjutant of my regiment. Tall, almost Phoenician-looking with his swarthy features and black moustache, resplendent in Glengarry, blue patrols and strapped evening tartan trews, he came aboard the liner to meet me. Flashing white teeth and a hearty hand-shake did much to de-congeal me from the chilling apprehension that had descended upon me when I had put on my new uniform for the first time since I had left Tilbury Docks.
‘Of course you have been with Jimmy for the whole voyage so at least you know somebody in the Battalion.’
‘Jimmy, sir?’
‘Don’t call me ‘Sir’ except on Parade. Colonel and Majors you address as ‘Sir’, always; everybody else by their Christian names once you get to know them. Jimmy McDonald—he’s on board isn’t he? Ah, here he is now.’ Henry Hawkins then gave a rather restrained welcome to my shipmate and snorted when he learned that we had so far not met.
‘How bloody silly,’ he said and introduced us.
Jimmy McDonald was a fairly senior subaltern with rather shifty eyes, the complexion of a hotel night porter and a blonde straggly moustache. I was relieved to learn from Hawkins that I was to be in ‘C’ Company while McDonald was to join the Headquarters wing.
Hawkins brought McDonald up to date on various regimental news while we were gathering our hand baggage together and being ferried ashore by Carlo, the regimental boatman. The Markses pressed an antique Hebrew silver amulet into my hand for good luck and waved from the upper deck till I could no longer see them.
On the dock were several tough-looking ‘Jocks’ from the regiment working under the supervision of a sergeant: They were busy loading our heavy baggage and a mound of regimental stores on to mule-drawn drays. Only a few years before the German blitzkrieg would shatter the British Army, mechanisation had still not come to our infantry regiments.
‘Just room for two comfortably in the gharry’, said Henry Hawkins, ‘so you and I’ll go ahead to the Mess. Jimmy knows the way so he can follow.’ Actually there was room for four in the rickety horse carriage that now transported us up from the landing-stage down the main street of Valletta and out across the vast underground granaries to Floriana Barracks. ‘Watch the driver,’ said Henry Hawkins, ‘they are so superstitious here that, now the sun has gone down, he’ll keep changing his position so that the devil can’t come and sit beside him.’ We clip-clopped along at a good pace but I had a chance to notice the ornate sandstone buildings on either side and the Sunday evening promenade in the streets, the men walking up and down on one side, the women on the other. All the men in dark suits and clean white shirts; the women in black and a large percentage wearing the jaldetta—a large black cresent-shaped hood.
‘Yells, bells and smells—that’s how the Jocks describe Malta,’ chuckled Hawkins. ‘Just listen to their bloody bells now, Sunday evening is the worst. They all have a go but you’ll get used to them. You may get used to the yelling too. Most of that is the poor sods trying to sell goat’s milk, hot from the udder, but I don’t think you’ll ever get over the smells—I haven’t.
‘Now let me tell you a few things and ask me any questions you like. When we get to the Mess, you’ll meet Jackie Coulson—he’s orderly officer today. He’s about a year senior to you and he’s going to-look after you and give you a shove in the right direction. Being Sunday evening, there probably won’t be anybody else about. Incidentally, people in this regiment make it a point to take a long time to get to know newly joined officers. They reckon that they don’t have to rush things because joining a regiment is for a lifetime. So don’t worry if some of them, specially the more senior ones, are not very forthcoming for a little while. I had a hell of a time.’
He smiled to himself and tickled the back of his neck with his swagger cane.
Mine was a rather daunting prospect; being abroad for the first time in my life; joining a regiment in which I did not know one single soul; taking command of a platoon of hardened professionals, many of whom had been soldiering abroad for a dozen years or more, all under the watchful eyes of brother officers who, I gathered, were not going to be very helpful—and my nineteenth birthday still some way off.
To say that I was relaxed during our half-hour to Floriana would be a slight exaggeration. I was damp with apprehension which was not eased when H.H. told me that we would probably go on an Active Service ‘Stand to’ the following week. ‘The whole Mediterranean Fleet is pulling out for two months for their Spring exercises and we are expecting serious trouble—riots and sabotage at the Dockyard—that sort of thing. The Italians have been stirring up the Maltese for a long time and getting them all excited about kicking out the British and becoming part of Italy. When the Navy leaves we’ll be on our own—just one miserable battalion to c
ontrol this whole bloody island.’ The officers’ mess of Floriana Barracks was glued to the side of a huge church which housed the biggest and busiest and noisiest bells in Malta. They were banging away as we arrived.
Jackie Coulson met us at the door and Hawkins effected our introductions with sign language then, roaring above the din, explained that his wife and his dinner were waiting for him; he was driven off in the evil-smelling gharry.
Coulson signed to me to drop my two pieces of hand luggage inside the courtyard and to follow him. We passed through a door in a far corner and I found myself in a monstrosity, typical of the living quarters of British Army officers at home and abroad…brown leather sofas and chairs, a few functional writing desks, a large round table in the middle of the room covered with elderly copies of English daily and weekly papers; a large fireplace and mantelshelf with, above it, two signed sepia reproductions of pictures of King George V and Queen Mary and below it a large bum-warmer. Two morose and to my eyes middleaged officers in mufti were seated on this piece of furniture with drinks in their hands. The bells were a little fainter in here but the room had a gloom all of its own and was covered entirely with a thin layer of dust.
‘This is Niven,’ said Coulson, jerking a thumb in my direction. Like the guns of a battleship, two pairs of cold eyes swivelled towards me. There was a long silence. The elder and more mauve coloured of the two finally spoke. ‘Oh,’ he said.
They both continued to stare at me.
Coulson pressed a bell on the right hand side of the fireplace and a Corporal appeared in a white mess jacket with two gold stripes on his arm. ‘Sir?’
‘Double whisky,’ said Coulson. ‘Same,’ said the most mauve man draining his. ‘Same,’ reiterated the less mauve man draining his.