Owning Up: The Trilogy (50 page)

After listening, with ill-concealed hilarity, to this little catechism and delighting in its balanced mixture of officialese and almost Biblical reiteration, we were allowed to go.

We marched through the dockyard. The sunset looked like the disembowelling of a tropical bird. The twilight was both violent and sensual; houses and colonnades swarmed with unseen watchers. Cacti and palms embodied our excitement; even the advertisements for Nestlé’s Milk, being in Spanish, read like poetry. In Main Street fat shopkeepers stood at their doorways selling rubbish, but we did find some Edwardian postcards. In one of them a man with a long moustache sat dreaming on a balcony. In the smoke from his cigarette, a young woman, whose dress was covered in tinsel, had materialised.

We went into a café called the Trocadero and ordered vermouths from a Spanish waiter with beautiful eyes but a skin badly disfigured by smallpox. On the stage a fat woman in red and gold net danced for the Fleet. I bought a cake made of cream in the form of a rose. It had no taste. We smoked cigars and moved from bar to bar. We came across one of our Petty Officers alternately embracing a blonde whore and eating cheese sandwiches. On the other side of the room four sailors were beating up a fifth, but were so drunk as to make little progress. Nevertheless, the boy wept bitterly, his hair hanging over his eyes. Various other matelots were dancing together. Others, ignoring the notice ‘No men allowed on the stage’ were singing ‘Maggie May’. Tables were overturned, glasses broken, and the manager, sighing resignedly, charged more and more for his raw alcohol and blackcurrant juice.

‘Not only to redeem the Fleet’s good name, but also for their own sake…”

As we reeled back to the ship, singing ‘Nobody knows you when you’re down and out’ and reciting bits from Stephen Spender’s translation of Frederico Garcia Lorca, we could not fail to observe that, on every corner, unwise men were relieving themselves with evident satisfaction.

Next day Tom and I spent the morning on some low rocks from which the British Fleet emptied its gash (rubbish) into that tideless sewer, the Mediterranean. Our job was to burn out paint pots, a very satisfactory occupation, yielding a pleasure not unlike picking one’s nose. As we worked, some of the Spanish dockyard maties, admitted daily into Gibraltar to earn their living, turned over the mounds of rubbish in a search for half-eaten sausages or scraps of meat, which they dried on a wooden box and then ate with relish.

Despite the fact that the workmen were on British territory, Tom and I saw this as a symbol of Franco’s exploitation of the working class. Spain, being so close and, with the exception of Portugal, the sole remaining bastion of Fascism in Europe, had an almost pornographic effect on us; that is to use the word ‘pornographic’ in the sense of arousing simultaneously both excitement and revulsion. Spain, we felt, had been the ‘pure’ war. While secretly disagreeing with the British Anarchists in feeling that the struggle against Hitler was simply one corrupt force opposing another, we still thought of Spain as the great lost cause. There, before it had been crushed by the Stalinists, Anarchism had been a reality and not simply an ideal; had inspired action and fired guns. The death of the Republic had been mourned by a galaxy of talent: Auden and Isherwood, Spender and Connolly, Picasso and Miro. Like many of our generation we were infatuated with Lorca, a poet now seldom mentioned, and whom we believed (for later on the authors of his death were to become much disputed), to have been shot by the Falangists. In retrospect, the Civil War has come to seem more like a vivisection laboratory where two equally cynical and authoritarian powers experimented, under ideal ‘field’ conditions, with the techniques of sophisticated destruction. Some had already recognised this, but the message had not yet got through to us. Spain was more a state of mind than a place. Among the burning paint pots and scavenging dockyard maties we looked across the Straits to Algeciras and dreamt of freedom.

We couldn’t go ashore that evening but there was some very interesting news. On our return from Villefranche, our next port of call, there was to be an expedition to Seville via Jerez on offer to all members of the Fleet, both officers and men, at six pounds per head. Apart from the six pounds there was another condition: we had to wear civilian clothes — no problem for the officers, who went ashore in them anyway, but an obstacle to us. Not an insurmountable one, however. Tom and I immediately put our names down and wrote home; both of us for our civvies and me for money as well.

Next day was a ‘make and mend’ so, although we were meeting Felix that evening, Tom and I decided to go ashore early and walk up the rock to see the apes. Alone, released from social and class pressures, we were truly happy and at peace. We climbed in brilliant sunshine and showers of rain, through woods smelling of leaf mould and fern, past villas where children in red dresses played with hoops and white doves sat in the branches of olive trees. Cacti threw fantastic shadows across our path. We saw a child’s swing hanging in a grove. High up, from the north face of the rock, we could see the bull-ring of Lalinea.

‘Oh black bull of sorrow! Oh white wall of Spain!’ we quoted simultaneously. We picked narcissi and stuck them in our hats.

At last we found the apes, the responsibility of the Army, guarded by two friendly Tommies almost as agile as their charges. There were four large males in the enclosure, eight smaller and more active females and several babies, like kittens with the faces of sad old men. One of the males sat on an iron bar with a three-hundred-foot drop beneath him and made water.

We’d a quote ready for that too, although not from Lorca: ‘ “All is not gold that glistens,” said the monkey, as he pissed in the sun.’

Towards evening we came down into the town and met Felix, who had the ‘orrible Peter Ward with him and we got very drunk. Felix’s deep booming voice and magnificent laugh put us all in the best of humours, and the evening turned into a kaleidoscope of full and empty glasses, eyes, paper flowers, breasts, cigars, castanets, nuts, oranges and darkness. The Liberty guys, suitably glamorised, were everywhere but there was no inter-fleet fighting. At one point Tom and one of the American sailors changed hats. We met the Baron, who bought a round of drinks to toast ‘all Weymouth whores’. A Yank staggered up to Felix and asked him if he gave head. Felix said he didn’t.

‘Goddam it,’ said the Yank. ‘You’ve lost me two mother-fucking dollars.’

Quite suddenly, with that illusory and inexplicable speed which is a side-effect of drunkenness, Felix and Peter vanished, and Tom and I found ourselves trying to persuade a rather solemn Negro US army officer that the basis of society was criminal.

‘I’ve been in the Pacific,’ he told us somewhat irrelevantly, ‘but I believe in the good book, the Bible.’

It was pouring with rain and we took a taxi back to the
Duke.
Next day we heard that Felix had been arrested trying to crawl across the Spanish border. Pissed as a newt and covered in mud, he had spent the night roaring out in a police cell that his father was an Admiral; naturally no one believed him and he was returned under escort to the
Dido
next morning to be punished with a few days’ stoppage of leave.

We sailed at noon; the
Dido
for Casablanca, the
Duke of York
for Villefranche.

The trouble with being young and trying to write is other writers. Whatever you’ve been reading last gets between author and object, producing a solemn and ineffective pastiche, and so it was in my case. ‘Going abroad’ seemed to me so significant that I had begun to keep a journal (which doubled as letters to my mother) and which, however useful to me now as an aid to memory, has caused me, on re-reading, nothing but acute embarrassment and even from time to time a physical blush. The Surrealist declamatory style covered any revolutionary or poetic statements but, when it came to description, my current model was Cyril Connolly’s
Unquiet Grave,
a book then recently published, which had impressed me both deeply and disastrously.

We sailed for Villefranche [I wrote]. The blood soon moves with the sea. We arrived in the morning: mountains, the sleeping villas of the rich and the town on the quay. The seduction of colour: violet, white, pink, lemon, blue, green and scarlet. The seduction of heat, the wish to become a plant, to grow roots, vegetate and decay.

Ashore, Tom and I had several adventures. On our first leave, in a little bar as evening was falling, an enormous woman and her seven-year-old daughter came in. The child, who carried a marigold, was affected in the extreme. She told us she was a queen, strutted like a peacock, scratched herself like a monkey, offered us her hand to kiss and stuck her fingers in the air shrieking with manic laughter. Her mother smiled fondly, showing discoloured teeth. She told us her daughter’s name was Monique. Later, after omelettes, Camembert, French bread, red wine and coffee, feeling very much men of the world, smoking Gauloises and trying out our deplorable French on the
patron,
Monique was taken upstairs to be put to bed and immediately the
patron
intimated, a ringer laid alongside his tapir-like nose, that if we waited the mother would return. This news froze us with horror but we could think of no way to escape.

The woman came in. Before, she had smelt strongly of sweat. Now it was of sweat and cheap but pungent scent. She was not alone either. With her was another elderly whore, but bony and angular where she was fat and greasy. We bought them drinks, hoping to delay or avoid any further move. They nibbled our ears and ran down the Americans, whom they claimed were not
gentils.
They asked us if the English were as ‘cold’ as popular French legend maintained. We were in a quandary there: too enthusiastic a denial would only precipitate matters, but national pride demanded some defence. This, mild as it was, brought on the crisis. They led us into a back room where there was a divan, a brass bed and a portable bidet. On the discoloured walls was an Edwardian print of a naked woman with enormous thighs and buttocks. The fat
putain,
not unlike this image if considerably less fetching, reclined on the divan and patted a place for me to sit on it. The skeletal hag began to pull the petrified Tom towards the dubious bed. An inspiration, conceived in panic, struck me. I looked at my watch and clapped my hand against my brow in an exaggeratedly histrionic manner. The charm of their company had made me forget the time. We must catch the last bus back into Villefranche. Both women protested noisily, but I was firm. We would return on Monday. Slightly mollified they insisted on seeing us to our bus. There, under the cynical eye of a Petty Officer from the
Duke,
they embraced us fervently.

The next time Tom and I went ashore we decided to visit Monte Carlo, but before we left the harbour I was arrested by the French Customs. Cigarettes and soap were in very short supply in France that spring of 1947 and, like most of the ship’s company, I had thought it worth the risk to smuggle. So carelessly had I planted these commodities about me that, while I was buying a stick of nougat at a stall, a plain-clothed official, after the most casual glance at my bulging person, signalled to a uniformed colleague, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me to accompany them.

In the cool Customs shed I decided the best thing was to come clean. I put everything down on the long trestle table, and they demanded an explanation. I told them they were all for my mistress in Monte Carlo. She smoked like a chimney. And the soap? Very necessary
après I’amour.
They smiled. I took the opportunity to slide two packets of Gold Flakes away from the others and towards them. I carefully didn’t look in that direction. The packets vanished. They said I could go, and showed me how to stow away the soap and the rest of the cigarettes more convincingly. The thing was, they told me, that some sailors smuggled things ashore to sell on the black market.
‘Déplorable!’
I agreed in my absurd French accent accompanied by exaggerated Gallic gestures.
‘Absolument déplorable!’
I think it was my ham acting that made them spare me.

Tom was waiting nervously for me at the bus stop. As the queue was very long and there was no sign of a bus we decided to hitch-hike. Tom was at his worst, bullying me about everything both personal and political until I lost my temper and threw his hat into a public flower bed.

In a café we talked to a boy from Paris. He told me he was an Existentialist, but then most young Frenchmen with any intellectual pretensions claimed to be that in 1947. As Breton and Sartre were at it hammer and tongs I felt obliged, despite my secret admiration for the recently published
Age of Reason,
to defend Surrealism. He brushed this aside with that air of superiority and infallibility of which French youth has always had the secret, dismissing Breton as only interested in external phenomena. If he had been less beautiful, I might well have lost my temper. As it was I asked him to come on board the next day when the
Duke of York
was to be open to visitors.

Leaving him on comparatively amicable terms we set off in the direction of Monte Carlo and eventually we were given a lift by two elderly English ladies who were driving into the principality to shop. They were clearly very rich and told us how relieved they were that the war was over and they could return to live abroad, especially now that the Socialists had taken over and were making life impossible in England. Tom and I knew better than to disagree and anyway, as Anarchists, we felt under no obligation to defend Attlee. I did wonder though what Felix would have done. Probably he would have insisted on getting out and walking, especially if he’d had a few drinks.

Far below us lay the
Duke of York
at anchor. ‘A fine life,’ said one of the old trouts. They dropped us outside the casino.

I fell immediately and guiltily in love with Monte Carlo. I argued with Tom that if it represented a bad system, it was surely to be superseded by a worse. At least pleasure was involved whereas the grey conformity to come… I looked at the policemen in their musical-comedy uniforms, the cab horses in their little coats. In the shops were unbelievable luxuries to my war-starved eyes: scent bottles in the shape of medieval towers, lips or stars, orchids streaked with strange colours, huge boxes of chocolates compared with which David Webster’s offerings looked like a packet of jelly babies.