We Joined The Navy (25 page)

By lunch time the Cadets’ Notice Board was covered in invitations. They were all of a pattern. They were for ‘Swimming, Cocktails and Tennis--six cadets’; ‘Visit to a Nutmeg Plantation and Tennis--two cadets’; ‘Tour of a Rum Distillery and Tennis --eight cadets’; ‘Deep Sea Fishing Expedition and Tennis--two cadets’; and ‘Midnight Barbecue and Tennis--ten cadets.’

Every invitation, without exception, had this curious insistence on tennis. It seemed that whatever else a man might do in the island; he had at least to play tennis. The invitations gave the impression that the business administration of the island was done by people who broke off several times in the course of a working day to practise their backhand smashes and who formed a society which occupied itself, not in taking in each other’s washing, but in umpiring each other’s tennis matches.

There were more invitations than there were cadets prepared to accept them, but those cadets who did not wish to play tennis, or who hated tennis, or who had never learned how to play tennis, discovered that the word ‘invitation’ was meaningless. When The Bodger found several invitations not filled, his policy was quite definite. The Bodger had entertained the Governor’s Aide-de-Camp at lunch time and had disliked him on sight.

‘If the bastards want ten cadets to look round a straw hat factory and play tennis, they’re bloody well going to get ten cadets to look round a straw hat factory and play tennis. Mr Piles, detail off the watch ashore until those invitations are all filled. If that isn’t enough, detail off the non-duty part of the watch on board. If that isn’t enough, then go on detailing off cadets until every invitation is filled. Nobody’s going to tell me my cadets are not being sociable. They can all play tennis until their eyeballs drop out. If they don’t know how to play tennis, they’d better learn between now and going ashore.’

Mr Piles, the Chief G.I. and the Chief P.T.I, organised a witch-hunt. They scoured the cadets’ quarters and rounded up every cadet, duty or not duty, sick or well. Cadets who had not intended to go ashore, cadets who had intended to go ashore later, and cadets who were under stoppage of leave and not allowed to go ashore, were routed out of the hiding places about the ship where they had hoped to read, sleep or write letters. They were herded together and ordered ashore to play tennis.

Tennis racquets were at premium. The ship’s sports store was quickly exhausted and the supply of private racquets ran out soon after and it looked for a time as though The Bodger’s plans to launch his cadets in society were to be defeated for lack of tennis racquets. But The Bodger was indefatigable.

‘It doesn’t have to be a
tennis
racquet, godammit!
Any
racquet will do. All cadets proceeding ashore must have a sporting implement of some kind.’

The later boatloads of cadets were armed with tennis racquets which had strings broken, handles split and splices missing. The very latest departures carried badminton and squash racquets, cricket bats, hockey sticks and billiard cues. One cadet merely wore a fives glove.

The cadets were mustered by the Chief G.I. on the upper deck and detailed off in parties.

‘ . . . from ‘ere to the left--Museum and Tennis Party. Party, left turn, quick march, carry on to the museum. From ‘ere to the left, you as well--Botanical Gardens and Tennis Party. Party, left turn, quick march, carry on to the botanical gardens. From ‘ere to the left--Visit to Sugar Cane Plantation and Tennis Party. Got your sporting implement? Let’s see it. Right. Party, left turn, quick march, carry on to the sugar cane plantation. From ‘ere to the left--Scottish Country Dancing and Tennis Party. . . .’

George Dewberry was ordered ashore to visit a rum distillery, taking with him a croquet mallet, one of a set of six owned by the Navigating Officer. Tom Bowles found himself in a massed party who were going to visit a straw hat factory; they had two tennis racquets, a putter and one old football boot between ten of them. Raymond Ball, with The Bodger’s No. 7 Iron, and a strange cadet whom Raymond had never seen before, with a fencing foil, were allocated to a visit to a nutmeg plantation.

Michael took his own racquet and Cartwright a superb Slazenger’s championship racquet to the botanical gardens. Paul was Cadet of the Watch and glad of it.

George Dewberry’s party were met by one of the distillery’s lorries, redolent with rich spirit and promising well of the visit to come. Tom Bowles was met by an orange bus and Michael by a young negro clergyman leading a crocodile of small black children. A gigantic black chauffeur in a gigantic black Ford waited for Raymond Ball.

The chauffeur introduced himself by backing the Ford into a melon-stall. Amidst the rolling water-melons, the screams of the stall-keeper, George Dewberry’s raucous shouts from the top of the rum lorry and Michael’s puzzled face on greeting the clergyman, Raymond Ball and the strange cadet drove off.

‘The Chief Stoker won’t half be worried,’ said the strange cadet with the fencing foil, as they drove through the crowded streets of the town.

‘Why?’ asked Raymond Ball.

‘I was supposed to be dipping the tanks for the readings, see, and I was just on me way through the Cadets’ Messdeck when the Cadet Gunner give me this and told me to hop down into the boat sharp. So I did. But the Chief Stoker won’t half be worried.’

‘You mean you’re not a cadet?’

‘Cadet? I’m the Fresh Water Tanky!’

‘Good God! Hey, driver! Stop a minute, there’s been a mistake!’

The driver turned round. A huge grin split his face from cheek-bone to cheek-bone. The car swerved towards the side of the road.

‘No stop, sir,’ said the driver. ‘Stop when we get there, sir.’

A black face swam nearer Raymond Ball’s eyes. The car squealed as the driver wrenched it away from a wall and headed it down the middle of the street.

‘Oh, well,’ Raymond said. ‘It’s too late now. We’re on our way to a nutmeg plantation, by the way.’

‘That’s O.K. by me, sir. I could just do with a little bit of black ham.’

The Fresh Water Tanky put his fencing foil on the floor of the car and sat back to enjoy the ride.

A mile out of St George the tarmac stopped and the track began. The track was loose gravel and sand and it plunged up and down hills shaded on each side by trees and cane. The sun struck vivid patches of brightness across the car’s path between the intervals of the trees. The openings gave glimpses of more green hills and vegetation in the distance. In villages chickens and children ran across the road almost under the wheels of the car. Sometimes the car passed a bus crammed with cheerful black faces and startlingly coloured cotton dresses. Through the open car window came the smell of the West Indies, the compounded aroma of sugar, ripe fruit already decaying, and rich fertility.

When the nutmeg planter, a fat, olive-skinned man in a crumpled palm beach suit, greeted his guests, he seemed puzzled by the golf club and the fencing foil.

‘You must be very fond of sport,’ he said. ‘I am afraid that we have few facilities here. We haven’t even a tennis court. Did somebody tell you...?’

The planter broke off in perplexity. Raymond Ball and the Fresh Water Tanky hid their sporting implements behind their backs. A mistake had been made. (Later, The Bodger discovered that the residents had sent their invitations to the Governor’s office and some of them had genuinely been for tennis but a clerk in the office, thinking that all Englishmen played tennis and would be disappointed if not invited to do so in Grenada, had added ‘& Tennis’ to every invitation regardless of the host’s original intentions.)

‘Never mind,’ the planter said. ‘Now you would like to see the nutmegs.’

But it was a hot afternoon and they went no farther than the first shed where the nutmegs were laid out to dry, being occasionally raked over by a bored negro. After that, they sat in deck chairs on the verandah and drank iced lime and lemon. The planter did not seem anxious to entertain them further and Raymond Ball and the Fresh Water Tanky were happy to sit in the shade and do nothing; that in itself was a sufficient change from
Barsetshire
. They were in the position of people sitting at ease in the house of a stranger who was not anxious to make polite conversation or bother them in any way. It was more than likely that they would leave without even introducing themselves.

In the evening the planter introduced his wife who was fat, placid, gold-toothed and as incurious as her husband. She made supper of iced coconut milk and grated nutmeg, fried fish and fruit. The planter brought out his whisky and they sat down and drank it as calmly and as unhurriedly and in the same companionable silence as they had drunk lime and lemon.

After dark they went inside and the planter and his wife set up a mahjongg board. Then the planter clapped his hands and at this signal two octaroon girls came in through the open french windows from the garden and sat down by the guests. They were both young and had the peach-down freshness of skin and the large sloe eyes of their race.

The planter and his wife yawned, shook hands with their guests and went out of the room. The inference was plain. They had done all they could to make their party a success. They had provided liquor, entertainment, and young women. It was now up to the young men.

The young men were not at first disposed to take advantage of the facilities offered to them. Drugged by the sun and by successive unaccustomed whiskies, they sat drowsily in their chairs, like the victims of Circe. There was magic in a house which could produce two beautiful young girls at the clap of a hand; it smacked of witchcraft, of a genie’s palace where strange wonders could be wrought from the darkness at the rubbing of a ring.

The octaroon girls sat at the feet of the chairs seemingly content to wait until some form of activity was suggested to them. Even Raymond Ball, who was normally stimulated by the presence of women, found it difficult to broach the conversation, having so little upon which to start.

‘Would you like to play mahjongg?’ he asked at last.

They played mahjongg. The girls won easily. After the game the girls resumed their positions at the feet of the chairs.

‘Would you like to see the nutmeg trees?’ asked the girl nearest Raymond Ball, suddenly.

‘Eh? O.K., if you want to. I suppose that’s what we came for, after all.’

Outside, the evening had grown cool. The house stood on the northern slope of a valley which led to the sea. As Raymond and the octaroon girl stood on the verandah, a fresh wind rustled up the valley from the sea and shivered the tops of the palms. Behind the trees on the crest of the hill on the other side, the moon climbed slowly, its silver circle glowing in the night sky like a jewel. Small clouds sailed high and powdery in an indigo sky. The fronds of the trees in the valley bent together and dappled as the wind touched them; the whole of the opposite hillside rippled like a smooth ocean breaking into tiny waves, spreading out and fading back into stillness again. Faint sounds came up out of the darkness, the tinkling of an instrument like a triangle, the throb as of drums, and calling voices, but up on the hillside it was quiet.

Raymond Ball felt the girl close to him. He stood looking down the valley, conscious of her closeness.

Suddenly she turned and put her arms round his neck, and lightly kissed him on the lips. Her lips were firm and warm and caressed him as they left him.

‘I know what you want,’ she whispered.

‘Do you? What?’

‘It looks out of your eyes.’

He put his hands on her hips and felt their suppleness. ‘All right,’ he said firmly, ‘show me these bloody nutmeg trees.’

When Raymond Ball arrived back on board
Barsetshire
, George Dewberry was giving trouble. The tour of the rum distillery had been a roaring success. Dewberry had been helped back from it, paralysed with rum. Raymond Ball helped to undress George Dewberry, pack him in his hammock and lash him down.

‘I don’t know how he gets like that’ he said to Michael, as they stood panting after their exertions. ‘Just show him anything remotely connected with the alcohol family and he gets paralytic!’

Raymond Ball began to undress.

‘Where’ve you been today, Ray?’ Michael asked.

‘Oh, visiting a nutmeg plantation.’

‘What have you been doing to them, cutting them down or something? You look positively grey. And, my God, look at your back! It’s all scratched to hell! Looks as though you’ve been
wallowing
in nutmeg trees.’

‘They’re very interesting things. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed looking at a tree more in my life.’

The novelty of being Cadet of the Watch had long worn off for Paul. He had helped the Gunnery Officer supervise the unloading of three boat-loads of cheering, rum-stricken sailors and he could hear a fourth boat approaching the ship.

The fourth boat brought Paul’s reward. It contained Able Seaman Froggins. Just before he went off watch Paul was privileged to see Able Seaman Froggins, armed with a palm-chopping machete, chasing the Gunnery Officer round the quarterdeck.

At Georgetown, Barbados,
Barsetshire
gave an official cocktail party, as she had done at every port she visited. The invitations for the party were distributed before
Barsetshire
arrived, and although it might have been a matter of concern to the British residents whether or not they were invited, the cadets worried not at all.

The quarterdeck decorations in
Barsetshire
were identical at every cocktail party and were indeed standard for all cocktail parties in all H.M. Ships. They depended for their effect, not on any especial artistic merit, but upon their novelty for the guests, most of whom only rarely visited a warship. ‘We could cover the ship with fishhooks and barbed wire,’ The Bodger said, ‘and they’d still be thrilled to bits.’

The quarterdeck was scrubbed and every piece of visible brass was polished. The vulgar and utilitarian wooden cages which concealed the bollards and the after capstan were covered with white cloths and vases of flowers. The quarterdeck guard-rails were bound with canvas screens and flags were hung from the quarterdeck awning. Burnished shell cases were placed at intervals as ashtrays. One bar ran down one side of the quarterdeck and a second bar ran down the other. A third bar was placed across the after end at right angles to the other two. The guests were thus confined in a small arena surrounded on three sides by a barricade of drinks and glasses; a guest who struck out in three out of four directions would find something to drink and in the fourth he would find the toilet.