The Fortunes of Fingel

by Simon Raven

  “Ah, old bean, already Fingel has a plan.”

  It was the early summer of 1957, some three months after Fingel and I had both been posted home from Kenya to our Regimental Depot in the West Midlands, where we were responsible for training recruits. Since our Training Company was staffed with highly experienced Non-Commissioned Officers, it ran itself quite satisfactorily without any very active intervention from the two of us, who therefore spent most of our time on the excellent National Hunt courses that abound in that area. However, the onset of summer had brought an end of National Hunt racing; and since Fingel did not care so much for the Flat, and, unlike myself, did not care much for cricket, he had been compelled to cast about for other interests. At first he had gone in for the daughters of the local gentry; but as these, having marriage paramount in mind, had seen little future in being fingered by Fingel, he had achieved very little in that quarter, and now, bored and disgruntled, he had turned most of his attention to his stomach. The West Midlands, however rich in National Hunt courses, was (and still is) poor in restaurants. Fingel, fed up with driving many miles to eat bad food at high prices, had determined that he would henceforth seek his culinary pleasures where these could be most conveniently and economically purveyed to him – in our own Mess at the Depot. He had therefore dedicated himself to raising the deplorable standards which obtained there and had spent the last three weeks tormenting both the Mess Staff and the members of the Mess Committee with his demands for interesting or at least wholesome refreshment. Such demands had often been made before, and as often resisted; but such was Fingel’s pertinacity and power of insult that even the sluttish and obdurate crew who ran the Depot Mess had been somewhat discomposed – to the extent that they had decided to turn Fingel’s spleen away from them by co-opting him in their own ranks and had at length contrived, as I have just related, to make him personally responsible for the Mess catering.

  “Oh yes indeedy,” Fingel repeated to me now: “Fingel has a plan.”

  “Might one ask what?”

  “You wait and see, old bean; you just wait and see.” For several days the food in the Mess was as awful as ever. Then, about a week after Fingel’s appointment, there was suddenly a luncheon of masterly conception and cookery: hot marrow on fried bread followed by chicken breasts in oyster sauce. An excellent dry vin blanc was served (without extra charge, Fingel informed us) and there was a choice of appetising and unfamiliar cheeses. Dinner that evening consisted of red caviar with blinis and sour cream, a delicate and boneless fish broth, and an expert blanquette of veal, all accompanied by a selection of several wines gratis; and luncheon the next day was distinguished by grilled lobsters. By this time the message was getting through: Fingel had worked some sort of miracle in the kitchen. Needless to say, some of the old guard at once began to complain of what they called “trumped-up foreign muck” and of the automatic service of wine (“who’s going to pay in the end?”); but since Fingel firmly asserted that in providing this food and wine he was not overspending the sums allowed for the purpose, most of us were entirely content with the new state of affairs, though all were convinced that Fingel “couldn’t possibly keep it up”.

  Yet keep it up he did. Gulls’ eggs and asparagus in season, langoustines and Dublin Bay prawns, even, on two occasions, fresh foie gras – all these and other delicacies, as well as a series of classical main dishes (coq au vin, chicken Kiev, entrecôte Béarnaise, etc., etc.), appeared in carefully calculated and stimulating sequence for day after day, week after week. The food in our Mess became famous. Local and municipal notabilities, who had previously despised us as “the military” or “that crowd at the barracks”, toadied shamelessly for invitations; visiting warlords, who had once choked at the notion of our Mess and had often put up at the nearby hotel instead, now arrived a day early and stayed two days longer than they needed to. By the time that the first month of Fingel’s administration had gone out, and there had been, as he had promised us, no perceptible increase in our mess bills, Fingel had come to be regarded as a gastronome and dietician of genius and “Chez Fingel” (as the Mess dining-room was now called) was envied and marvelled at by soldiers from Whitehall to Edinburgh Castle.

  But doubts still lurked in certain breasts, not least in mine. If no extra charge was being made on our mess bills, how was all this luxury being paid for? Fingel, when challenged on this point by the Commandant, said it was all done by intelligent planning and marketing and resourceful use of by-products and leftovers. “The French system, Brigadier,” he said: “if you hear of a glut of something, you buy it up cheap – even if you have to get up at four in the morning to do so. And for the rest, waste not, want not. Don’t chuck your bones away – use ’em to make soups and stock pots. Or if someone leaves a slice of meat on his plate, mince it up and pop it into a pâté.” The Commandant, who like many of his kind enjoyed his food but was largely ignorant of how it was procured and processed, was only too ready to be convinced. But I knew better. For one thing, no amount of intelligent marketing or getting up at four in the morning could elicit, from any source, fresh foie gras and langoustines at a rate which our Mess could afford; and for another, even if French techniques of planning and contrivance could be held to explain the new quality of our cuisine, how on earth had Fingel taught our sour and grimy corporal cook to apply them? Before the advent of Fingel, the man had taken positive pride in the vileness of the food which he prepared for the “fuckin’ officers”. How had Fingel induced a change of heart in him, let alone educated him to his present level of performance?

  “Very simple, old bean,” said Fingel, when I finally insisted on an answer to these questions. “You find a highly qualified civilian chef…one who’s had a spot of bother in London, let’s say, and is happy to retreat to the provinces incognito for a bit… and you hand over the Mess kitchen to him. The corporal cook is happy stewing in his married quarter all day and never coming near the place; the other scullions on the role knuckle under to the new man, without asking any questions, provided you unofficially double their pay. The new man knows how to handle the marketing, to make special orders from London – or even from Paris and Strasbourg – and that’s it.”

  “You’ve got a civilian chef in there?”

  “Oh yes. I knew of one who’s done a spell in chokey for violating an apprentice or two in a famous London hotel. He’s very glad to have the job. And nobody’s noticed he’s there because nobody except me goes near the kitchen. That’s why the food was in such a foul state when I took over.”

  “But how on earth do we pay for all this?”

  “In all the circs, we get our man at cut rates.”

  “But even so, he and his food must cost a packet. How can the Mess conceivably find the money?”

  “By courtesy of Sergeant Sweenie Mack.”

  “Whatever can you mean?”

  “As Second-in-Command of the Training Company,” said Fingel, “you may just have noticed that Sergeant Mack has for some time, by an inspired appointment of my own, borne the title of NCO i/c Coordination of Training and Resources.”

  “Yes. I wondered what all that was about.”

  “It means,” said Fingel, “that Sergeant Mack is the man responsible for seeing that the three platoons of recruits at present under training are provided with the correct equipment and then do whatever they are meant to be doing with it at any given time of the day. As Company Commander, I am too occupied with documentation and policy to supervise much actual training, while you, my 2 i/c, are too busy playing cricket four days a week. So the burden of the thing devolves on Sweenie Mack.”

  “I take a look now and then,” I said.

  “Yes. At the one platoon which happens to be training in barracks. Sweenie Mack always keeps one platoon in barracks in case the Commandant gets his monthly fit of conscience and wants to see some activity in train. But where are the other two platoons? As long as something is going on under your noses, it wouldn’t occur to you or the Comman
dant to ask.”

  “Well, where are the other two platoons?”

  “Doing odd jobs of a menial but not ill-paid kind all over the county. Everyone, from squire to scrap-metal dealer, occasionally wants a temporary labour force for something or other. The word has gone round: get in touch with Sweenie Mack at the barracks – he has between sixty and seventy good men and true (two platoons) available on request to shift or dig, to push or pull, to bury or erect, at reasonable rates – and no trouble over unions or insurance stamps. Of course, a certain deference must be paid to military convention, so a code is used: ‘Sergeant Mack,’ some potential employer will say, ‘I have some ground which you might find suitable for manoeuvring or exercising your recruits.’ ‘Very public spirited of you to assist us,’ Mack will reply; ‘when is your training area available?’ ‘From 0800 hours next Friday,’ he will be told, ‘until 1600 hours.’ And then off go our two platoons, while you are still happily abed, for ‘training’ at the time and place allotted, and back they come at tea-time, while you are elegantly playing at bat and ball, having earned, say, a hundred quid for whatever they have done there. Mack gets ten per cent and the rest keeps our chef and kitchen going – and enables me to issue free wine. At the moment we are averaging an income of £400 a week and expenditure of £350. The favourable balance goes into a special private account of my own.”

  “But the recruits – haven’t they smelt anything fishy?”

  “Most of our recruits are very simple-minded. West Midland boys, whether of agricultural provenance or industrial, are not perceptive.”

  “They’re not quite potty either.”

  “Ah. Mack has a genius for presenting whatever task they must undertake in a military guise and making it appear to be a branch of training. Shifting derelict machinery becomes ‘An Exercise in Disposal of Heavy Stores, previous to the Retreat’. Digging deep holes is, of course, ‘Training in Excavation of Earth Latrines, as required by Army Council Standards of Hygiene for the Tropics’. And so on.”

  “Some of the recruits must see through that. The potential officers, for example.”

  “Mack knows all about potential officers, old bean, having had so much to do with the finished article. Potential officers,” said Fingel, “are sent off to the Depot Education Centre all day long for ‘Courses of Tactical and Strategical Reading, in Preparation for Officer Candidature’. In fact they read whatever they fancy and they know a good thing when they see it. There’ll be no trouble from them.”

  “There’ll be trouble from somebody.”

  “No doubt,” said Fingel: “we are all born to it. But meanwhile we enjoy a very passable table, as I think you will agree. Carpe diem, old bean, as the Latin chappie has it: ‘reap the day’.”

  But alas, carpe diem, or something very similar, was also the maxim of our brilliant chef. After he had “reaped” the two more complaisant of his soldier-assistants in the kitchen but been vigorously complained of for his attempt on the third, he had to be (a) sacked and (b) explained to the Commandant. Luckily Brigadier Arthur de Courcy Villiers-Clunbury-Pratt, though slow of thought, was a man of this world. Wisely deprecating the prospect of an official enquiry, he pacified the outraged Kitchen-boy by the award of two months’ compassionate leave, posted Fingel and Sergeant Mack away on long and punitive courses at the School of Infantry, and gently required myself to direct the Training Company in a resumption of normal schedules. “We can’t afford any more rows for a bit,” said this excellent old gentleman, “so get the show ticking over properly again, Simon, and cut your cricket from four days a week to three…just for the next fortnight or so…there’s a good chap.”

  Fingel’s Penitence

  Tactical Wing,

  School of Infantry,

  Warminster.

  June 27, 1957

  Dear Old Bean,

  It’s just too cruel. I realise that I had to be packed off from the Depot for a time after the row about the queer chef and the rest of it, and I realise too that some sort of penalty was in order, from the official point of view. But I thought that just being sent to the School of Infantry would be considered punishment enough in itself, and that once I was actually here I’d be put on a course for fat and cosy Company Commanders or something of the sort – after all, I was commanding Training Company at the Depot. But what has happened is savage beyond belief. I’ve been assigned to a course for Platoon Commanders. To refresh my knowledge and rehabilitate my physique, according to the Posting Order; in other words, to bash me about. Obviously the Brig at the Depot wants to give me a shaking-up – and after all those beautiful meals I provided. There’s gratitude for you. Me, Fingel, Captain Fingel, all of twenty-eight years old, on a Platoon Commanders’ course, along with a lot of horrid little ticks who’ve just passed out of Sandhurst and some bumptious young negro bucks from places like Nigeria. All as keen as mustard, of course, and as fit as mustangs. I did have some hopes of a couple of full lieutenants who are joining with University commissions; at least, I thought, after three years of Cambridge they’ll take the Army with a big pinch of snuff and be a bit short in the wind like me. But not on your nelly – no allies in that quarter. The ex-undergrads spend all their spare time on long training runs, “to catch up with the young ’uns” as one of them put it. They’re as keen as any of the Sandhurst warts and twice as sycophantic to our abominable Instructors.

  As for these, they’ve got the word all right, that Fingel’s to be put through the mangle, and they’re grinding away like Trojans. “At the double, Captain Fingel.” “Say ‘sir’ when you address a Field Officer.” “Thirty seconds late, Captain Fingel; take Orderly Officer for a week.” “Captain Fingel, since you are on a Platoon Commanders’ course, your monthly credit for drinks in the Mess will be limited to that of a subaltern” – a really vicious cut, that last, and delivered by the most abominable of them all, a rumbling red-coat from the Beds and Herts called Colonel Ferrers-Box, OBE. He has a bald head with little tufted spikes sticking out of it, long and very bandy legs, and a nose like the stem of a golf-tee. He is in charge of all the Platoon Commanders’ courses, but since ours is the only one going on just now he spends his whole time sniffing round us like a neurotic truffling pig who might at any moment go rabid.

  If Ferrers-Box wins the horror prize round here, a very close runner-up is Major Kitby of the Royal Marines, who is in charge of the section I’m in. Kitby is a sword-and-bible-cold-shower-and-three-rounds-in-the-ring specimen, straight out of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, who hates, in ascending order, gambling, sex and intelligence. When I raised a Bridge four in the Mess one evening, Kitby came and broke it up because he’d overheard us agree on sixpence a hundred. “Permitted stakes in the Mess are a farthing a hundred,” he shouted (yes, shouted), “and even that is an accursed thing.” But what really sends him up the drain-pipe is any kind of irony or evasion where military duty is in question. Yours truly discovered a sweat-saving path through a thick wood the other day – a path which Kitby didn’t know existed. He was so put out that I’d saved the section from hacking its way through the undergrowth that he declared the path to be “mined” and made us start again and cut ourselves to ribbons on the brambles.

  So here I am, listening to priggish lectures about Leadership and Officer Quality, or, worse still, clumping round assault courses in ammunition boots and full webbing equipment, for all the world as wretched as a recruit at our Depot. But Fingel is out for revenge, old bean; he is out to tarnish and corrupt. For Fingel is the fallen angel, the creeping serpent in this garden of military innocence and efficiency; and despite the rosy health and squawking enthusiasm of the subalterns, despite the pee-brained integrity of the staff, Fingel will find the rotten apple that is always lying somewhere around and will place it where it may most noxiously ferment in the smug and virtuous barrel. Meanwhile, I crouch in my damp and draughty room, among forbidden stores of whisky and champagne (imported in brave defiance of Ferrers-Box, OBE), plotting and peering
. Already I think I see my way. More of this in my next.

  Love from

  Fingel.

  School of Infantry,

  Warminster.

  July 2

  Dear Old Bean,

  Always something new, they say, out of Africa. You remember I said we had some blacks on this course from Ghana and the like? Well, I’m not keen on blacks as a rule – nothing to do with their colour, just their infernal conceit – but I’ve spotted a real winner in our section. A horrible uppity brute he is, straight off a coconut tree but full of socialist saws and progressive instances, dead true to the modern form in every way. So what’s so special about him? Old bean, he has a perfect photographic memory – something I’ve often read about but never seen in action. Show this black a page of anything – French, Greek, calculus, anything – and for the next forty-eight hours he can reproduce it in writing down to the last iota subscript, and this though he hasn’t the first idea what it is or what it’s about. If it’s in English or his own lingo, he can spout it off orally as well; but the great point is that if you get him to look at a diagram or a map or even a page of meaningless doodles, he can reproduce it down to the last little squiggle for up to two days after he last saw it.

  Now this, along with his colour (for Anglo-African relations being the sensitive area they are, the authorities here can’t afford the tiniest row with him or about him) makes him just what I need for my works of subversion. You see, I’m the only person who knows of his remarkable talent. Feeling lonely one evening, and finding that all the goody-goody Sandhurst boys had gone to bed, I saw him hanging about and hauled him into my room faut de mieux for a drop of my private juice, after four large glasses of which out it all came (about his photographic memory, I mean) in a great spate of mission-boy boasting. He’d kept it to himself till now, he said, because he was afraid we’d all think it was rather weird and might give him unfair advantages in tests and so on; and I had no trouble convincing him that he’d better go on keeping it quiet. But since I now knew his secret he let me test his claims for my own amusement – and I found them as good as gold. I showed him four pages of my breviary for five seconds each, and he wrote ’em out word for word the same time the next evening. So here I am, sitting on a prize asset: an asset, what’s more, who’ll do anything for me in return for a few slugs of Scotch whisky, which he is very partial to but cannot normally afford because his stingy Government in Africa has the great good sense to keep him very short of money.