Owning Up: The Trilogy (39 page)

Next day we hid behind a low cupboard on all fours waiting for the Watts to arrive. Unfortunately, believing the art-school to be empty, Ma Watt allowed herself the luxury of a discreet fart and Pa Watt, following in her wake, asked if she’d ‘pooped’. This set us off into audible giggles. Ma Watt ordered us out from behind the cupboard, told us off for being childish; and asked us suspiciously why we were hiding there anyway. We told her we wanted to hear her reaction to our Surrealist exhibition without her feeling inhibited. ‘What Surrealist exhibition?’ she snapped. Her husband explained that he’d said we could hang our pictures in the sculpture room.

Snorting with irritation at his compliance, she threw open the door. We needn’t have shown any fear as to the inhibition of her reactions. She went puce with rage, told us to clear up ‘that damn insulting mess!’ and barred us from the art-school for a week. Tony was delighted. We’d proved her bourgeois conformism masquerading as tolerant modernity. It was up to us now not to go crawling back. We didn’t show up for the rest of the term. I decorated my study with the bust with the condensed milk-tin breasts and we met there to play our jazz records – Ma Watt had objected to the seriousness we’d showed in that area too. ‘It’s just fun music,’ she’d complained.

Eventually Guy and I made it up with the Watts, but Tony Harris Reed never did. I looked forward to his arrival at Pwllheli with rather anxious anticipation.

At first sight, but this was not unexpected, Tony looked unexceptional. His uniform fitted him, his hat was on at the prescribed angle. He hadn’t even bothered to bleach his collar. I introduced him to Tom and the rest of my circle of friends. He and Tom didn’t really take to each other. Tom’s idealism, which had, during the past few weeks, coloured my own thought-patterns, seemed rather wet to Tony’s way of thinking.
His
Anarchism was more mocking and subversive. He had little belief in the effectiveness of political or anti-political action. On the other hand, since I had last seen him, he had rooted out a great deal more information about Surrealism, discovering for example that there was an active group in London led by the Belgian poet and collagist ELT Mesens, then 42, the friend and entrepreneur of Magritte, and the publisher of the prewar
London Bulletin.
In the back of the
New Statesman
he found an advertisement for several recently published pamphlets and broadsheets, as well as a book of Mesens’ own poetry and another by Paul Eluard, translated by someone called Roland Penrose. Tony had some money and I, as usual, wrote home for some, and we sent off for these in high anticipation.

Meanwhile, under Tony’s sharp eye, life at HMS
Glendower
began to assume a more hallucinatory aspect. He was quick to recognise the potential, as ‘a Surreal personage’, of a boy I introduced him to with the curious name of Arding Jones, and it was he, rather than Tom, who became an intimate.

Arding Jones was as odd as his name. He was tall, hawk-like and with a really depressing acne-scarred skin. He’d been to public school and was superficially a traditional rugger-bugger, but he fancied only pretty working-class lads. To make his life more difficult, however, he was reduced to a ferocious rage by working- class accents irrespective of their region of origin, a dilemma he solved by taking out his fancy and spending a great deal of money on the pictures, beer, cinema, etc,
on condition the boy didn’t open
his mouth once.
Stranger still, he was never without a companion usually, to me, most enviably desirable. I had found this rather shocking, although I liked Arding well enough, but Tony relished the absurdity of it. The long silent evenings, full of loving glances, but with no verbal communication, he said, must be intensely erotic.

Among Arding’s other peculiarities was his insistence on mastur- bating twice a day at exactly 11am and 3pm (or I5oohrs as the Navy insisted we call it). As a rule this presented little difficulty. If we were in class studying gunnery or semaphore signals, he would simply ask to go to ‘the heads’. Occasionally however there would arise a situation which presented what one might imagine to be a more tricky problem. One morning we were all detailed off to help a local farmer thin out some root crop, and 10.45am found us isolated in the centre of an enormous field with another hour and a half to go before the lunch break. Amused expectations arose, for everybody knew of Ard-ing’s clocking-in time. At 11am precisely, he left the furrow, marched smartly a distance of some ten yards, lay down, undid the flap on the front of his working bellbottoms, and set to entirely uninhibited by our noisy encouragement, and appearing in no way disconcerted by our ironic applause at his success.

The final, and in some ways most unlikely, facet of Arding’s character was a fierce republicanism. This was in no way unsympathetic to me, as a Surrealist and an Anarchist: the centrist argument that a monarch, above parliamentary or political affiliations, was the best defence against totalitarianism naturally held no weight. Even so Arding’s ferocity, bordering on mania, astonished me. He wouldn’t even refer to the King by name; he called him ‘Korky the King’, a form of alliteration he’d based on ‘Korky the Cat’, a character in the
Dandy
comic. In particular his subterfuges to avoid standing for the National Anthem, except when completely unavoidable as on the parade ground, went to any lengths and he would sooner miss the last five minutes of a film than remain at attention during what he always called ‘Korky’s tune’. Sometimes we were caught out; a film came to an end without the usual slow fade-out or give-away swelling chords, but even then he would rush agitatedly up the aisle muttering angry runes and imprecations like a vampire confronted with a crucifix. I felt obliged in his company to follow and, indeed, one night we ran into the erect form of a Warrant Officer who took our names and numbers, and we were reported and given three days’ ‘number elevens’, that is to say, confined to camp and put through an hour of punitive drill to boot. Arding was in no way contrite. He blamed it all on Korky.

Arding liked neither jazz nor Surrealism but he, Tony and I spent a lot of time ashore together. Not that I deserted Tom. I went ashore with him too, but had to admit to myself that our evenings together lacked something of the hysterical and mythical quality of my nights with Arding and Tony.

Tony in his own right had begun to operate effectually. Strengthened by the Surrealist canon – for the books had arrived and we spent many hours absorbing their message – we both declared ourselves convinced atheists, and Tony’s first practical demonstration of our new-found freedom from ‘Judaeo-Christian mysticism’ was to steal some bottles of admittedly unconsecrated Communion wine from the chapel, and we all got extremely and indeed disastrously drunk in his chalet.

We had also decided that we should write to Mesens in London pledging our fealty to Surrealism and, to this end, Tony began to make some beautiful if excessively Ernst-influenced collages – I remember one in which some Victorian sportsmen were engaged in shooting at a flying turtle – while I had begun to write poetry of what I hoped was a genuinely Surrealist flavour. ‘The egg is always surrounded by birds,’ one of my poems concluded. ‘The gun by corpses, the bicycle by lovers / We are going to ascend in this ornate balloon / Much to the astonishment of the ladies and gents.’

When we had created enough collages and poems, we sent them off to the address printed on the Surrealist pamphlets and waited anxiously for a reply.

Meanwhile we strove, within the limits imposed by the Navy, to live the Surrealist life. There was, for example, the visit to the Abyssinian princesses. Rumours reached us from one of Arding’s. lads (for there was no embargo on their speaking to us when he himself wasn’t within earshot) that in the nearby village of Griccieth, three young ‘darkies’ had been sighted riding their bicycles through the chapel-haunted streets. This in itself excited me. Through jazz, anyone black had become sacred and I was always writing home to tell my mother that I would marry only a negress, and that there was no question that if Bessie Smith had still been alive it would have been her. (How the Empress of the Blues would have reacted to my proposal never occurred to me then.)

A little later I found out something more concrete about the three girls. They were grand-daughters of the ‘Lion of Judah’, and this, as I explained to Tony Harris Reed, gave me an entree. My father’s cousin, John Melly, a witty life-loving man of strong Christian principles, had taken out, in his capacity as a doctor, the only British ambulance team during the Abyssinian war. He had unfortunately been killed on the very last day, shot by a drunken Ethiopian who’d mistaken him for an Italian, but he was considered to be a great hero by both the Emperor and his people. (There is a John Melly Street in Addis Ababa and a wing of the hospital is named after him.) We had, therefore, every excuse to call on the Lion’s grand-cubs. I proposed that it would be truly ‘Surreal’ to visit them in a Welsh village wearing our best bellbottoms. Tony agreed and, on the next make-and-mend, we walked between the lush Welsh summer hedges to the little town and, after a couple of enquiries of extremely voluble locals, found our way to their modest lodgings.

A suspicious Welsh landlady with a small but definitive beard answered the door and, after listening to our explanation, showed us reluctantly into a small parlour while she went off to fetch the princesses’ governess. It was a very Welsh parlour, hung with admonishing texts promising a far-from-reassuring future life. There was a table in the window with a potted fern on its dark-green bobble-edged cloth and many faded sepia photographs of the dead. What undid us though was a large Victorian steel engraving above the mantelshelf. It showed a small child wearing a nightgown and in the act of embracing a presumably symbolic sheep. The sheep in its turn regarded the child with what I presume the artist intended to be an expression of loving anthropomorphic piety but, to our eyes, it seemed almost grotesquely lascivious while at the same time extremely shifty. We began to giggle, and the sudden entrance of landlady and governess discovered us almost helpless with hysterical laughter. This made our task the harder. The governess was Scottish, with pale ginger hair and a forbidding expression, but we managed eventually to persuade her that I had a genuine reason for meeting her charges, and we were asked reluctantly to stay to tea.

This in fact proved quite a success. The princesses were very beautiful, their glowing black skins and fine features appearing doubly exotic in the dusty little dining room, with its ticking marble clock. They were also full of high spirits and Tony and I made them laugh a great deal so that even the governess allowed herself an occasional frosty smile. Indeed one joke led to a minor disaster. Princess Ruth, the youngest, had just swallowed a mouthful of orangeade when something Tony said caught her unawares and she performed the nose-trick.

‘Dearie me!’ said the governess, busy with a handkerchief. ‘Poor Princess Ruth has been quite overcome.’

Our training continued, but became a little easier. On the cliffs at the edge of the camp we learnt to fire a mounted anti-aircraft machine-gun. Our instructor was a short and tubby Geordie Petty Officer who demonstrated the effectiveness of the weapon with a certain practical ferocity.

‘Yer see that shite-hawk,’ he said, pointing to a lone seagull flying from left to right across the middle distance. We agreed we did. He fired a short burst.

‘Well now yer doant!’ he told us with savage satisfaction. Tony and I wondered how many innocent shite-hawks had involuntarily sacrificed their lives in this way in the service of democracy.

One day, the war in Europe was over. It wasn’t a night we were due to go ashore, nor was it an occasion I can especially remember. Everybody got rather drunk. Some chalet windows were broken and a few wire litter baskets set on fire. Next day training continued as usual. There were still the Japanese. The arrest of the chief Nazis, the discovery of the charred bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker, seemed almost a logical and commonplace conclusion to the whole phantasmagoria. Tony and I felt more concerned about waiting to hear from the Surrealists in London.

We had meanwhile acquired an enemy, a Warrant Officer, the same man who had apprehended Arding and myself leaving the cinema during the National Anthem. He, disliking our levity, our background, and our rather flirtatious relationship with the Petty Officers, did what he could to harass us. One day Tony devised a very typical revenge.

We had found on the shore, during our long and excitable walks in pursuit of the ‘marvellous’, a large dead starfish and brought it back to camp. Then one of us put forward an idea for a Surrealist object. We would buy a common mousetrap and put the starfish in it as though it had been caught. This we did and so pleased were we with the effect that we decided to take it into Pwllheli and have it photographed – intending, if the result was satisfactory, to send a print to London in pursuit of the poems and collages and in the hope of expediting our yearned-for acknowledgement. Tony decided, however, that we could draw a subtle advantage from this activity. After making sure our enemy, the Warrant Officer, was to inspect the Liberty Men, he placed the object in an empty tickler tin and persuaded me to conceal it in my mackintosh pocket in so furtive and yet obvious a way as to lead to certain detection.

‘Tickler’ is naval slang for duty-free tobacco and in those days every rating was entitled at regular intervals to a large tin, at an extremely modest price. This was a great help financially but naturally enough, given the rarity of cigarettes in ‘Civvy Street’, there was a considerable temptation to smuggle one’s ration ashore in order to sell it at an enormous profit, and to help dissuade us from this course the penalties, if we were caught, were correspondingly severe.

Tony knew that our enemy, the Warrant Officer, who always inspected us with particular thoroughness, would be sure to find the tin, and so he did.