Owning Up: The Trilogy (51 page)

Men in uniform were not allowed inside the casino, but we bribed an official with some of the cigarettes I’d brought ashore – for following my arrest I hadn’t found the courage to try and sell them in Villefranche – and he showed us round. I was particularly impressed by the little theatre. Its gilt and velvet, cherubs and swags of carved fruit seemed the epitome of Edwardian opulence. I would return here with Edouard, I promised myself. I knew he adored the tables and had, several times in his life, faced ruin through his passion for gambling. He had once shown me a photograph of himself strolling along the seafront with a mistress in the 1920s, very much the
boutevardier
with his Maurice Chevalier straw hat and cane.

Short of funds, I suggested to Tom that we went into the most expensive hotel to see if anyone picked us up for dinner. Surprisingly he agreed, aware no doubt that if there was any carnal price to be paid I would do the paying. At the long white bar of the Hotel de Paris I ordered two martinis. ‘They are paid for,’ said the barman, sleek as a worldly prelate, but it was no rich queen who sidled up to us. Our benefactor was an ex-naval Captain, a loveable old bore abrim with breezy anecdotes. He invited us to join him for dinner – ‘Now I don’t want you to refuse, lads. Wouldn’t ask you if I couldn’t afford it!’ – and introduced us to a smart, bored woman in her late thirties – ‘Runs one of me businesses.’ A little later her mother appeared, a dear old thing whose sole contribution to the conversation was to divide everything – people, objects, dishes, decor, politics, places – into one of two classes: ‘nice’ or ‘not nice’.

The Captain took us to a small but expensive restaurant. Tom clammed up completely, but it didn’t really matter as our host ranged the seven seas and some forty years afloat on them, while his business associate contributed a certain amount of contemporary scandal. She told us that in their hotel was an ex-mistress of a French duke who brought back a different impossible man every night, but even the servants treated her with contempt! Her mother didn’t think this was at all nice. The Captain offered no comment, but went booming on about destroyers during ‘the first show’.

After dinner they went to a boxing match and we to the station, Tom complaining bitterly at the boredom of the meal and attacking me for playing up to them. I found this a bit tough as he hadn’t exactly held back on either food or drink and had left me to show interest and gratitude. While waiting for the liberty boat we drank green chartreuse and I sent off a letter to ELT. There was a lot of flirtatious
entente cordiale
on the jetty between some French and British sailors. Next day the French boy came aboard as promised and I showed him over the ship. In the chain-locker flat where I had taken him, not innocently, but without much hope, he suddenly made a pass at me, and for half an hour the disciples of Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton forgot their differences in each other’s arms.

11

Before returning to Gibraltar we moved out into the Atlantic for some more manoeuvres. Passing another Mess Deck I was unexpectedly seized, debagged and had some jam shoved up my arse to the accompaniment of excited and humourless laughter. As a public schoolboy I took this fairly philosophically, reflecting that after all it could have been boot polish for starters, but it led me to think about what I really felt about the Lower Deck and this was easier to do on the huge impersonal
Duke of York
with its wearying and complicated routine, and its inflexible bullshit. My jam besmearing was fortuitous or, if not so, no more than the result of my advertised effeminacy. I looked coolly that evening at my messmates. There was only Tom I was close to, and our friendship was constantly under strain. For the rest I admired our Leading Seaman, the very funny, astute, humane and well-informed Bill Rainbow. There were three other ratings who seemed to me to have an instinctive grasp of life. They were under-educated, but unblinkered by prejudice or convention. For the rest, I thought, they were all babies, mental age about five and with no curiosity or wish to grow up. The only difference between them was that some were nice babies and some nasty. It was true that most of them were tolerant and easy-going, but there were times, especially when I was over-tired, when the monotony of “their conversation, the squabbling over rations, the endless sexual badinage and the senseless and sexless reiteration of rhythmic swear words, drove me almost distraught with irritation. By a chance remark of mine, I discovered that two-thirds of them had never heard of Bernard Shaw. This really surprised me as he was always in the newspapers, frequently to be seen prancing about in his tweeds and bathing-suit on the newsreels, and two of his plays had been made into comparatively successful films. I looked at my mess-mates with almost Fascist contempt that evening. Perhaps the jam had upset me more than I realised. One boy was writing a letter to a girl he’d met in Portsmouth and quite liked, but wished to make it clear that he didnlt want her to think he intended to go steady. He asked my advice. Would it be better, with this in mind, to finish up his letter with ‘God bless’ or ‘cheerio’? I said I didn’t see it mattered. The mess deck rocked with scorn. ‘I thought you were meant to be fucking educated!’ said the letter-writer. ‘Of course it fucking matters!’ The general consensus was that ‘cheerio’ was less committing and I sulkily slung my hammock.

Arriving back in Gibraltar we discovered that my money for the Spanish trip hadn’t arrived and nor had either of our parcels of civilian clothes. We solved the first problem by going on board the
Dido
and, as no one had any money to lend us, cashing a cheque with the Chaplain. The clothes presented a more serious problem as the one condition the Spaniards had made was that nobody, neither officers nor men, was to wear a uniform. I solved it with the aid of a friend in the clothing store. Some time before the Navy had ordered an alternative working rig, but decided against issuing it. It was to have been called ‘Number Eights’ and consisted of non-bellbottomed canvas trousers and pale blue shirts. In the stores there were also a number of canary yellow ties of unknown significance and some badgeless red parachute berets. Tom and I tried these outfits on, ‘borrowing’ them in exchange for a ration of tickler and the promise of both our tots before dinner. Personally, I thought we looked rather dashing.

The next morning, when it was still misty, with the promise of heat, we climbed excitedly into the cutter and were rowed across the calm waters of the harbour to where the officers and ratings in their ‘civvies’ were waiting to board the coaches into Spain. Comparatively few ratings had decided to go but among them were Felix and the ‘orrible Peter Ward. Felix was at first effusively friendly to me (less so to Tom whom he had not forgiven for half-accidentally cutting his nose the night we got so drunk in Gibraltar), but suddenly, after a few words from Peter, he became inexplicably cold and distant. When Peter had gone off for a pee, I asked him what it was all about and, rather shamefacedly, he told me. Peter had insisted, and Felix had agreed, that as they were to be in civilian clothes, they must look smarter than any of the officers; a revenge aimed to compensate for Peter’s irritation at being ordered about by men he privately considered extremely common but whose uniform entitled them to treat him as an inferior. In consequence, both had gone to immense trouble. Peter was in a very well-cut suit in Prince of Wales check and looked as if he were on his way to a rather smart race meeting. Felix presented an equally impressive if rather more rural image in good but excessively hairy tweeds and shoes heavy enough for rough shooting. The officers in their off-the-pegs, blue blazers and grey flannels were indeed, in the most literal terms, out-classed. Peter’s rage and Felix’s coldness (for despite his many true qualities he was not entirely displeased to be chosen out of the entire ship’s company as the only possible companion by the son of an earl) was due to finding their one-upmanship ruined by having to acknowledge two figures dressed like the opening song-and-dance act on a third-rate music-hall bill.

Two coaches were waiting, but what with all the sulking and furtive explanations going on, we were rather late finding seats. Somehow (I forget if I engineered it or not), I found myself on the same coach as Felix and Peter with Tom sitting by the driver in the other one. Accident or no, I was disgracefully relieved. Without Tom’s aggressive intransigence, I could at least bring Peter round to the point of toleration – not, to be fair to myself, that I cared all that much about his good opinion, but I was desperate to regain the right to Felix’s company, without whose jokes and cultural cross references I felt the trip would lose much of its zest. As an initial tender of my good intentions I removed my tie and beret and put them in my ditty box, promising to buy a more suitable tie at our first stop. Felix’s naturally gregarious and affectionate disposition soon surfaced but Peter still sulked. ‘I won’t have lunch with you!’ he snapped.

The coaches moved across no-man’s-land towards the heavily-guarded frontier, containing this microcosm of the great British obsession with class structure. To recap in more general terms: an aristocrat and a member of the upper-middle classes having dressed up in order to demonstrate the social inferiority of their middle-class naval superiors are betrayed by the appearance of a couple, one middle class, the other educated working class, the former of which is prepared to disassociate himself from the latter in order to regain the attention of the member of the upper-middle classes, who is himself unwilling to relinquish the approval of the aristocrat. At the same time I was equally obsessed with Spain, as of course were Felix and the betrayed Tom. Here entirely different cultural criteria were at work: Egalitarianism, Revolution, Anarchy! How the mind is able, admittedly more often when one is young, to accept two simultaneous concepts, which not only bear no relation to each other but furthermore demand totally different responses, has remained a continuous puzzle to me. I glared with loathing at the soldiers at the border in their ‘dung-coloured uniforms’, shook with fervent indignation as an officer stopped an old peasant with a donkey and, having emptied the panniers full of rags and papers on to the dusty ground, stirred them over with his jack-boot and strode off. I inwardly cursed the policemen in their coal-scuttle hats and cloaks, and blessed the impassive peasantry in whose heart, I was sure, still smouldered that revolutionary spark which would one day burst into glorious flame.

We moved on into Andalusia, Felix and I quoting Auden at each other, and wondering – wrongly as it happens – if Cyril Connolly, Spender or Isherwood had passed along this way a decade earlier. Peter asked who on earth these people were. ‘Poets,’ we told him. ‘Writers,’ he snorted with the contemptuous indignation of the confirmed philistine. I’d achieved my object. Felix would never isolate himself for two days with someone who’d never heard of Auden.

In retrospect it is amazing just how much that poet did mean to people of my generation and temperament. He was of course a great poet, but I think there was more to it than that. My own belief is that he was able to express our revolutionary aspirations while at the same time indicating that he shared our background and our guilty love/hate for its way of life and institutions; a spiritual nanny to bandage our knees and warm the milk for our Ovaltine after our imaginary struggles on the barricades. Even when prophesying the collapse of capitalism, he made its decay wistfully attractive and there was, in his stern admonitions, something reassuringly reminiscent of a popular and fair-minded head of the house telling one off for slacking. Even the phrase for which he has been so often and so severely attacked, ‘the necessary murder’, had no more weight than ‘the necessary beating’ which would hurt him more than it hurt you, but was essential for the sake of the school.

This is not a recantation. The younger Auden was infinitely superior to the drunken and dribbling reactionary of the later years, and Fascist Spain remained, up to the death of Franco – indeed up to the time of writing – a repressive and brutal regime. Speaking as an Anarchist, I held even then no illusions about Stalinist Communism or indeed any other kind. What I regret though is the way I couldn’t look at what I saw without interpreting it through a grid. If one learns anything as one gets older, and sadly one forgets a lot too, it is to objectify.

The trip involved a visit to a sherry factory on the estate of a marquis. By the gates were two wire cages, one containing budgerigars, the other crocodiles. As it was siesta time the tall white buildings were deserted. In the sunny yards were trees of bitter Seville oranges. We walked between the great vats of maturing sherry, past armies of bottles and through the yard where the barrels were made. The guide told us they were made from real American oak, and that it was very expensive. Finally we came to a cleared space at the end of one of the buildings. Here was a long trestle table on which were dishes of stuffed olives, bits of cheese, anchovies and rusks. Girls in Andalusian costumes offered us sherry, glass after glass of it, and pretended that they were unable to understand the word ‘no’. We, for our part, pretended that we minded. Swigging it back, I sententiously suggested to Felix that it was clear that the Government wished us to see the country ‘through an alcoholic mist’. Equally solemnly he stopped drinking long enough to agree.

On the ends of some huge casks which lined the walls were photographs of previous marquises. In one of them the present owner, as a small boy wearing a straw hat, was playing with a toy sherry barrel. A little later he appeared in person, and stood there, plump, sleek, and smiling blandly, as he watched us lurching about. On leaving we were presented with three sample bottles of sherry and a big bottle of Spanish brandy. If my conjecture as to the intentions of the Spanish Government was in any way justified, we were certainly co-operating most wholeheartedly.

We lunched in Jerez at a hotel where the page-boys insisted on shaking hands. I remember walking about the lobby arm in arm with one, but as everybody was so drunk it seemed in no way indiscreet or even mildly unconventional. Lunch was a disaster. Most of the ratings were ‘flakers’ in the lavatory and the
Dido’s
Doctor was constantly interrupted. Although by this time I could have joined Felix and Peter, I decided not to, believing it would serve as a mild slap across the wrist to Felix, and sat down with another rating off the
Dido.
It was as well I did so. The rating vanished precipitously between the
hors d’oeuvres
and the two fried eggs which followed it, and simultaneously Tom appeared, roaring drunk and in no mood to avoid a confrontation with the ‘orrible Peter Ward, which would have carried us all back to square one.