Ginger, You're Barmy

by David Lodge

  ‘Any complaints?’ inquired the officer briskly as he came up to us.

  The others at our table muttered ‘No, sir’. I couldn’t find the courage to complain, but Mike said in his soft, distinct voice:

  ‘The potatoes are watery.’

  The officer checked himself in the act of turning away. One could almost see the mechanism of his training grinding laboriously into motion. He appropriated my spoon and tasted a morsel of the potato with a rigid control of his facial muscles. Swallowing hard, he said:

  ‘Nothing wrong with that.’

  The sergeant lingered behind after the officer had walked off.

  ‘Just arrived?’ he asked, in a tone of ironically affected doubt.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Mike.

  ‘Uhuh.… You’d better change your attitude quick, sonny, or you’ll be in trouble. And just remember to address an officer as “Sir” and a sergeant as “Sergeant”.’

  The others at our table regarded Mike curiously.

  ‘Pom,’ said one of them, digging his fork into the potato.

  ‘Eh?’ said Mike.

  ‘Pom. That’s why it’s watery.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I see.’

  ‘What’s Pom?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘Dehydrated potatoes. They mix it with water.’

  I pushed my plate back in disgust.

  ‘No wonder it’s so vile. What’s the object? Potatoes are cheap enough.’

  ‘They’re probably still using up stocks from the last war.’

  We rose from the table and went over to the waste-food bin, into which I scraped most of my meal. I learned to avert my eyes while performing this task in future. As we moved towards the door I saw a face which I seemed to recognize.

  ‘Just a minute, Mike, who’s that over there? My God, surely it isn’t——’

  But it was: Gordon Kemp, another member of our department who had graduated that summer. My surprise was due partly to the fact that all three of us should be in the same place, but more to the change in his appearance, which had caused me to falter in recognizing him. His clumsily-cropped hair stuck up in tufts above a white, haggard face; his neck, always rather long and thin, sprouted like a sickly stalk from the gaping collar of his drab denims, which seemed to contact no part of his anatomy between his shoulders and ankles. He was eating greedily, and spluttered when we clapped him on the back.

  ‘Oh hello,’ he said finally. Then, with a grin, observing our civilian clothes, ‘Just arrived?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Mike. ‘How’s life?’

  ‘Pretty grim at the moment. Bags of bull. But we pass out on Thursday, thank God.’

  ‘Bull, what’s that?’ I asked him.

  He grinned again. ‘You’ll soon find out.’ He looked up at me as he sluiced down the last of his gravy-sodden potato with a gulp of the sweet amber-coloured tea. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, laying down his mug.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, taking the reference to my First with more alacrity than was perhaps consistent with modesty. ‘You were unlucky not to get a First yourself.’ Gordon had plodded his way to a deserved Upper Second.

  ‘No, I was quite satisfied. I’d never have got a First in a thousand years. Mike here would have, if he’d done a stroke of work.’

  Mike shrugged his shoulders. It was true, and the honesty of the remark was typical of Gordon. But it seemed to disqualify Gordon from membership of the small cell of cultured resistance to the Army which I was already subconsciously forming with Mike. Despite his gaunt appearance Gordon seemed to be almost enjoying the rigours of Basic Training; or at least applying himself to mastering them with the same dogged persistence he had brought to the study of Anglo-Saxon sound-changes and textual variants in Love’s Labour Lost.

  ‘Must dash now,’ he said, scrambling to his feet. ‘Full kit layout tomorrow.’

  ‘We’re just going too.’

  We followed him out to the tank of murky, lukewarm water in which we rinsed our plates and cutlery. Gordon’s hut was in the same direction as ours, and we accompanied him for a while. We learned the reason for his zeal: he was set on getting a commission.

  ‘Why d’you want one?’ asked Mike.

  He seemed somewhat taken aback by the question.

  ‘Don’t you want one?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘Well you get better living conditions for one thing. And it’s always useful for getting jobs afterwards.’

  ‘What sort of jobs?’

  ‘Oh, industry, Civil Service, that sort of thing.’

  We parted from him, and wandered back to our hut, which was chill and damp in the evening air. Mike threw himself down on his bed and smoked a cigarette. We exchanged a few desultory remarks about Gordon as I dusted the inside of my locker and unpacked my grip. I took out the Pelican translation of the Inferno by Dorothy Sayers, but found it difficult to concentrate. A few National Servicemen sat glumly on their beds, writing letters or watching the boisterous pranks of the Regulars. The dominant personality among the latter was an individual called Norman, squat and powerfully built, with short legs and a great pear-shaped head ravaged by what I took to be the legacies of venereal disease: he had what the Elizabethans called a ‘French crown’. He spoke a thick, harsh dialect of the East Midlands. His favourite exclamation was ‘a French letter wi’ a patch in it’, and his favourite threat ‘I’ll ride ya’. This last, when carried into action, consisted in his throwing himself on one of his mates who was lying on his bed and pretending to rape his victim by bouncing violently up and down on top of him. This had evidently become quite a sport among the group, and often half a dozen of them would pile on top of one man and pound the breath out of him, shouting and laughing. After the third such demonstration I closed my book in despair.

  ‘Isn’t there somewhere else we can go?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘I think there’s a Naafi somewhere,’ he replied, sitting up. ‘Let’s go and look for it.’

  ‘Our friend Norman is rather like Caliban, don’t you think.’ he observed as we walked through the dusk, ‘“A very land-fish”.’

  ‘That’s Ajax, in Troilus and Cressida, actually,’ I said. ‘He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster. Thersites, Act Three scene three, I think.’ Catching the flicker of a grimace on his face I added hastily. ‘But it fits him all right. So does Caliban.’

  The Naafi canteen was a large, high room with round Formica-topped tables screwed to the floor at regular intervals and a long bar which supported two urns, some wizened doughnuts under a plastic cover and the breasts of a pasty-faced girl who surveyed us listlessly as we approached her. The canteen was almost empty except for a group of seasoned-looking veterans who were sitting round a table littered with beer bottles. Mike’s eyes brightened as he saw the latter.

  ‘Can you lend me a pound, Jon?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I feel like a drink. In fact I feel like a whisky.’ He asked the girl for a whisky.

  ‘What d’you think this is, the Officer’s Mess?’ she replied, without lifting her breasts from the counter.

  ‘Oh all right, I’ll have a beer. What have you got on draught?’

  ‘Only bottled.’

  Mike sighed. ‘Bass?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Red Triangle then.’

  I was glad to see that there was a better selection of food behind the bar than on it. I bought a ham roll and a cup of coffee. We occupied one of the corner tables. Mike swallowed a third of his beer and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ I said.

  ‘Not worth it. I’ve just taken a pound off you.’ He added: ‘I must write off for some money.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve plenty.’

  After a pause Mike said:

  ‘Actually, I was thinking that if I had had any sense I wouldn’t be in this place.’

  I was pleased to hear this. I had been trying to disguise from Mike my own increasing disma
y at the prospects opening up on all sides, fearing that he might consider me rather weak.

  ‘Where would you be then?’

  ‘In Ireland.’

  ‘Are you Irish, Mike?’

  I had been wondering about this. His name and physical appearance seemed to suggest that he was Irish, but his speech was distinguishable from standard Southern English only by a certain melodic softness of the vowels.

  ‘No, unfortunately. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. My parents are Irish, but I was born in England.’

  He told me something about his family background, which was a vivid miniature of recent Irish political history. The Bradys were a politically conscious clan, fervently nationalist and anti-clerical. Mike’s great-uncle had been a friend of Parnell. His father, a medical student at the time, had been closely associated with the Easter Rising of 1916. He still treasured a piece of rusty thread with which he had stitched a flesh-wound of Pearse’s. Mr Brady had escaped the reprisals after the failure of the Rising, but he had continued to support the Nationalist movement until, disgusted by the betrayal of Partition, he had emigrated with his wife, paradoxically to England, in 1924. He re-qualified as a doctor and set up practice in Hastings. Mike had been born there in 1934.

  ‘Has your father ever been back to Ireland?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Oh yes. I go there nearly every summer. I was in Dublin this summer, actually. I got my call-up papers there. I burned them, and took a job as a guide to American tourists.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘My mother sent me a telegram saying my father was seriously ill.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry Mike. Is he all right now?’

  He smiled wryly. ‘It was only a cold. The telegram was a trick, to get me back to England. My mother didn’t want the disgrace of having a deserter in the family.’

  I groped unsuccessfully for a reply. Mike’s laconic words opened a door on a violent, dramatic family life quite beyond my experience or comprehension. Ever since I had won my scholarship to a grammar school I had never encountered or expected any objection to my conduct from my parents. They were both over forty when I, their only child, was born, and they still seemed somewhat dazed by surprise. Sometimes I wondered if they had stumbled on the trick of procreation by accident; at other times I wondered if I were their child at all. They behaved towards me like an honest peasant couple in an old myth, entrusted with the care of some divine changeling. My by no means exceptional academic success had awed them into a timid submission to my will. Since my own temperament leaned naturally towards a tranquil, prudent, industrious existence, our relationship was an untroubled one.

  I was beginning to feel tired, and had heard that we would be woken at some impossible hour the next morning, so I suggested that we should return to the hut. Most of the occupants were in bed, some sitting up reading or writing letters, some asleep, despite the noise and chatter of the Regulars, some just staring vacantly at the ceiling, dreaming perhaps of the girls, suits and record-players they had left behind them. One—a married man with a family, as I later discovered—was reading a child’s comic, Beano I think it was.

  I changed into the pyjamas my mother had packed for me, and got into bed. Mike, like most of the others, slept in his underpants, and, like most of the others, continued to do so after pyjamas had been issued. This curious distaste for pyjamas among a large section of the male population of Great Britain, was another of those small, interesting discoveries I was constantly making in the first weeks of National Service.

  Just as the hut was settling down for the night, a lance-corporal came in, followed by a young fellow entirely hidden behind a mattress. The lance-corporal dropped a bag on a vacant bed, and guided the new recruit towards it.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said.

  A muffled ‘Thank you’ was heard from behind the mattress, which dropped on to the bed to reveal the latest and unhappiest addition to our ranks. He was a slender, willowy boy whose physical appearance suggested that he was a product of aristocratic inbreeding. The refinement implied in his fine, white skin and delicate bony fingers was qualified by a certain foolishness and even decadence suggested by his weak mouth, receding chin and pale, alarmed eyes. And even in those first few minutes I noticed that all his limbs were just perceptibly out of control. He fumbled awkwardly with the straps of his bag, dropped several objects several times, and his rather large feet were constantly getting entangled with the legs of his bed. At the time I put this down to nervousness. For he was unfortunate in that the only vacant bed was in the midst of the Regular camp at the far end of the hut. The Regulars welcomed the diversion afforded by his late arrival.

  ‘Miss yer train mate?’ asked one of them.

  ‘Yes, I did actually,’ replied the newcomer, blushing. There was a general laugh. Someone echoed the ‘actually’.

  ‘Yer wanner watch it mate. Yer’ll be in the guardroom before yer’ve got yer uniform on.’ More laughs and cat-calls.

  ‘Don’t listen to them, youth,’ said Norman, with mock sympathy. ‘They’re as thick as a cow’s c——t.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said the young boy, plainly uncomprehending, but hoping that this misshapen creature might be friendly.

  ‘’E don’t understand you, Norman,’ someone shouted. ‘You’re too ignorant.’

  ‘Shut up or I’ll ride ya.’

  ‘Why don’t you ride ’m. ’E’s got a nice arse.’

  The young boy flushed violently.

  ‘What’s your name, youth?’ inquired Norman.

  ‘Higgins.’

  ‘No, your first name.’

  ‘Percy.’

  Norman turned his head away, grinning with triumph at the information he had extracted. His pals crowed with delight, tossing the name to each other on gales of laughter. Percy’s name gave them a kind of purchase on him, and he was assailed with questions from all sides. If he had had any sense he would have remained silent and got into bed as quickly as possible. But he took a painfully long time over his unpacking, and answered all the questions he understood with instinctive politeness. Those he didn’t understand were answered for him.

  ‘Where d’you come from, Percy?’

  ‘I was born in Lincoln, but I’ve been at school in Hampshire.’

  ‘Was it a girls’ school, Percy?’

  ‘No, it was a boys’ school.’

  ‘Percy, ’ave you ever shagged a girl?’

  ‘No, Percy shagged the other boys.’

  When Percy asked where the w.c. was there was a cry of ‘Norman, take Percy to the shit-’ouse, ’e wants a piss.’ And when the unfortunate boy took off his trousers preparatory to going to bed, the noise grew to a crescendo. One Regular writhed in his bed, vividly simulating uncontrollable sexual excitement. We National Servicemen at the other end of the hut sympathized with Percy, but made no protest. There was in fact nothing really malicious about the ragging; the pain was all in Percy’s acute sensitivity, the tenderness of which none of us appreciated until he began to go very red in the face, and puffy around the eyes.

  ‘Christ, I think the poor fellow’s going to cry.’ Mike said to me.

  The poor fellow was evidently a glutton for punishment, because he proceeded to kneel down and say his prayers. This took his tormentors by surprise. A certain atavistic respect for religion enforced a lull, but they soon recovered themselves. Since he no longer answered their questions they were obliged to use him as a kind of reflector for their own exchange of insults. Norman was begged not to take advantage of Percy’s posture. This inspired one of his pals to get out of bed and stand in an obscene attitude behind Percy. At this, Mike tossed back his blankets and stepped over to the Regular, tip-toeing on the cold stone flags. His white, muscular body was covered with fine, red hair.

  ‘Why don’t you leave the poor fellow alone,’ he said quietly. There was a sudden, expectant hush. Percy remained kneeling, but looked up wonderingly at
his rescuer.

  ‘It’s only a joke, mate.’

  ‘Well, the joke’s over. I should get back into bed if I were you.’

  ‘Who are you ordering about? I’ll do what I fugging well like,’ blustered the other.

  This tense situation was resolved by the re-entrance of the lance-corporal who had originally escorted Percy to the hut.

  ‘What the fugging hell’s going on in here,’ he roared. ‘I could hear the row half a mile away.’ His eye took in the little tableau around Percy’s bed. ‘Get back into bed you three,’ he said sharply. Percy crossed himself and got between the blankets. The other two returned to their beds in silence. The lance-corporal stood at the door with his hand on the light-switch.

  ‘If I hear another squeak out of this hut tonight I’ll have you all on fatigues every night for the next five weeks,’ he said. Then he put out the light.

  TWO

  I LEFT PAULINE’S flat at the usual time, 11.35. It was my practice to propose leaving at 11.20, so that I could enjoy her pleas to stay a little longer without worrying about missing the coach. Even if I did miss it there was the 1.30 milk-train from Waterloo, but it was a slow journey and meant a long, cold walk from the station. I took the tube to Waterloo, changing at Leicester Square almost unconsciously: I had done it so often.

  The car park opposite the Old Vic was full of coaches, though already several were leaving, packed with soldiers, sailors and airmen. The hot-dog stall and the coffee-stall were doing a good trade. A lot of people are going to be sorry to see the end of National Service, I reflected. Ben Hardy for instance. I caught sight of him beside his big grey Bedford Duple, talking to another driver. Ben nodded as I came up to the coach door.

  ‘Nice week-end, Corporal.?’

  ‘Fine thanks. Last time you’ll be seeing me, Ben.’

  ‘What! Getting demobbed?’

  ‘Next Wednesday.’

  ‘Bet you’re sorry.’