Good Enough For Nelson (12 page)

‘Good God!’

‘They misquote wildly or out of context some of our recruiting material in the student newspapers, so that they no longer mean what we meant, or mean anything at all. Occasionally, you get a RNR or TAVR stand at a freshmen’s fair knocked over and all the bumph pinched. Sometimes when the recruiting teams arrive to give their presentations, they find the doors blockaded and in any case they always outnumber their audiences by about two to one.’

‘Good God!’

‘Oh yes, it’s a battlefield all right, sir.’ Simon’s sense of grievance had obviously been roused by his reminiscences. ‘Sometimes they wave offensive banners. Like “Bring Back Flogging for Admirals”, and “What About Amritsar?” ‘

‘What about Amritsar?’ said The Bodger.

‘It was a massacre at a town in India called Amritsar, sir. In 1919, I think. The commanding British general ordered troops to open fire during a riot and some Indians were killed. One day they were giving their presentation lecture when the door opened and a girl rushed in and leaped up on the dais, absolutely topless, pointed to her breast and shouted “Why don’t you shoot me, you racialists?” ‘

‘So what did they do?’

‘Well, nothing much sir. For one thing, we were all quite struck dumb by her marvellous figure. She had one of the most sensational bodies I’ve ever seen in my life. Anyway, she pranced about for a bit, accused us a bit more about racialist atrocities and then rushed off again. Everything else seemed a bit of an anti-climax after that!’

‘But what effect does all this sort of thing have on our officers there? Surely we’re taking a risk that they’re going to pick up anti-Navy ideas?’

‘Well, that’s what the Old Guard tend to say, sir.’ Too late, Simon realised that The Bodger might think the description applied to him, and blushed at his solecism. ‘They say it delays the start of an officer’s proper training by three years, and all that. But there’s no evidence that any of this unrest affects any of ours very much. If they’d had any inclinations that way they’ve generally got them sorted out before they joined. We do get losses. But it’s some of the duller ones dropping out at the bottom. A few of the brightest ones at the top get seduced away by civilian employers’ offers. But very few really, sir, considering. After all, sir, they used to have much the same kind of argument about the introduction of the old Special Entry from the schools, before the First World War. That it would weaken the stock, dilute the Navy’s professionalism, and what was the use of having a place like Dartmouth if everybody didn’t go through the whole mill there, and all that. The hard fact is, sir, that we’re committed to university entry now. The sort of young man we want now goes to university more than he might have done in the past. If we want him, we’ve got to follow him there. Otherwise, we’ll be like fishermen waiting at the river estuary for fish who have all gone elsewhere.’

‘What do you usually say to them when they do begin to have doubts?’

Simon grinned. ‘That sounds like the padres under training, sir, when they begin to have doubts about their vocation.’

‘Don’t they put something in their tea, to stop them having doubts?’

‘I don’t think that’s to stop them having
doubts
, sir ...

‘A sort of doctrinal laxative, or something ...

‘A most unfortunate image, sir, if you’ll excuse me saying so. No, when they have problems, I just talk to them, have a chat about things generally, try and find out what’s at the root of it. Tell them about what’s going on in the College and in the Navy at large. Tell them about anything special coming up in the Service line, changes in pay or messing allowances, pass on all the College magazines and the general bumph that we put out. Just generally keep them in touch, until they get back here.’

‘You must feel like a missionary in darkest Africa.’

‘Sometimes, sir.’

‘So you wouldn’t say that our lads are much affected by all this student unrest that you keep reading about? I suppose that must be the working-class students ...’

‘Oh, not necessarily the working class, sir. In fact it is unlikely to be the working-class students causing disruption. Firstly, because there are not nearly as many true working-class students at university as one is led to believe. You hear a lot about equality in education, but nine times out of ten it’s the
parents
who haven’t been educated and some of them try like hell to stop their children going to university. They think, we never went, why should you, and in any case it delays the time until they get a
proper
job by three years. Secondly, the working-class student is too keen on getting a degree to pay much attention to anything else. He knows what it can mean to him. He knows better than anybody just how vicious, philistine, ungrateful, racially discriminatory, jingoist and generally bloody-minded the true working class can be. No, the trouble-makers are hard to describe. Impeccably middle-class, but somehow disgruntled with it. They put on a working class outlook and attitude, even a working-class accent. You can see it in the student press, in student politics, everywhere, there’s a sort of Pavlovian response to the mention of the armed forces and things like Polaris. There’s all the preoccupation with rent strikes, and sit-ins and demos, and solidarity with the working class, as they call it. There’s a sort of phony ring about it all, even the language is put on specially. It seems incredible to me that students should know all about social security payments and rent tribunals and all the rest of the apparatus. Those are for people genuinely in trouble. They do a good job. I’ve seen them at work, because some of our students live in digs or flats in some very shaky neighbourhoods. But all that kind of thing isn’t for
students
. They’re starting out in life with the best of futures before them. And the really curious thing is that they all drop all the demos and the trouble-making and the social conscience bit, once they leave university and start making a living. At one place the staff showed me a letter in their local paper. It was from one character who had been a renowned demonstrator in his time. Whenever there was any excitement he was in the thick of it. He was a right trouble-maker, and he was well known by name to the local press. So when they reported that he had been at the head of some recent demonstration he wrote them an indignant letter back. Not at all, he said get your facts right, he said, I’m out of all that scene now, he said. I’ve left university and I’m a tax-payer and a ratepayer and while I hope that students will be able to revolutionise the university eventually, I hope they will do it without violence.
Without violence!
He’d been the biggest tearaway since Jack the Ripper!’

‘You obviously ought to get danger money, Simon. Or hard-lyers, at the very least! ‘

‘I don’t know sir. Deep down they’re a hell of a sight more civilised and less aggressive than we were at their age. There’s something terribly appealing about them all. Their sense of humour always slays me. In their heads, for example, you see all these obscene remarks and drawings chalked up on the bulkheads but right in the middle you read “Sudden Prayers Surprise God”. In one Student Union building I went to, the heads had a contraceptive dispenser, a french letter slot-machine. There was a notice on the front stating that the product had been tested and approved to British Standard one two three four, I forget what the specification number was. But alongside it some wag had written, “So was the
Titanic
”! And somebody else had written, “This Gum Tastes Like Rubber!”!’

‘And on that note,’ said The Bodger. ‘The best of luck, Simon.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Meanwhile, about a quarter of a mile away and slightly downhill, in the drawing room of the Captain’s House, Julia was bracing herself to grapple with her own problems of communication, though without any of The Bodger’s superb opening confidence. Julia was about to hold a coffee morning, possibly for the first time in her married life, certainly for the first time for very many years. Julia never had coffee mornings, absolutely never. She abhorred them, and avoided other people’s if she possibly could. But she had felt herself so undoubtedly socially overawed by the College that she had decided she ought to make some immediate gesture of friendly willingness and hospitality. Morning coffee could be organised at short notice, and was both formal and informal enough.

Julia knew that however reluctant she personally might be, her husband’s job made her ex-officio queen bee, here and now, at this time and place; whether she liked it or not, it was inescapable. With the best egalitarian instincts in the world, she could not ignore Robert’s rank and position; she was the Captain’s wife and therefore required to provide a lead of a very subtle and very nearly indefinable kind. In different circumstances, households and social functions, she was successively the Captain’s wife, the Captain’s representative, a welfare officer, a damp shoulder, a marriage guidance counsellor, principal guest, an advocate with the father, a last resort, an
éminence grise
. Any Captain’s wife who tried to evade any of these roles, as they became appropriate, was not playing fair with her husband, the College, or with herself.

In some ways, the College was a social minefield, and for her guests that morning Julia had simply taken the first eight or nine names of the officers who had signed the visitors’ book in the entrance porch and had written a postcard to their wives, using the addresses in the Baby List. In her carefully worded invitations and in her subsequent telephone conversations, Julia had made it clear that priority in the visitors’ book had been the only criterion for selection, and no other considerations of rank or seniority.

As she watched Purvis tramping round, putting out the coffee cups, setting out trays of biscuits, moving tables around, and connecting up the percolator near a hot plate, Julia was suddenly gripped by an appalling bout of stage fright. She began literally to shake with nervousness. She could see them all, all her guests, in her mind’s eye, speeding purposefully towards her in their little motor cars, closing rapidly in upon her. She remembered some of the terrifying senior officers’ wives of the past, whom she herself had trembled to approach. Most terrifying of all was probably Rosy O’Grady, Flag Officer Gibraltar’s wife in the forties, or even Lady Monson, Flag Officer Second-in-Command, Far Eastern Fleet, in the fifties. Betty Monson had been so overpowering that even The Bodger, very seldom abashed, once deluged his lettuce with salad cream and then ate it up every mouthful, declaring that it was delicious, although he had discovered at the first taste that the salad cream was actually custard. Betty Monson’s stewards had mixed up the jugs. But, as The Bodger freely admitted ever afterwards, with Lady Monson’s glittering saurian eye fixed upon him, he simply had not had the courage to say a word. And anyway, he always used to conclude the story triumphantly, neither had any of the other fourteen admirals, captains and commanders and their wives at the same dinner party. They had all waited for their hostess to notice the mistake but she, it transpired, never ate salad cream and sat glaring at them all until they had all eaten up their greens, every bit.

Julia wondered whether Betty Monson or any of the others had ever trembled in their shoes when beginning a new appointment with their husbands. At Dartmouth probably not, because they would never have got the chance. It was only in comparatively recent years, as The Bodger had loftily told her, that wives had been allowed anywhere near the College. Previously they were always regarded as unsettling influences, distracting officers and cadets from their proper duties, and it was forbidden for them to live closer than thirty miles from the College. But now, as everybody said, staff officers came up the Dart like salmon to breed.

Julia was wearing a tweed skirt. The others all wore trouser suits. So that was wrong. They all came, everybody who had been invited, except Ruth O’Malley, the PMO’s wife. One of her children had woken up with suspected German measles. Hilda, Jerry Braithwaite’s wife, made Ruth’s apologies.

‘We have illnesses in the family,’ she said, ‘but poor Ruth has an epidemic. When we all have flu, Ruth has something like the Black Death. Do you know, I’ve never been in this room before, would you believe?’

Somebody else said, ‘I’ve never been in the Captain’s House before.’

‘That’s probably because Jimmy had nobody to entertain for him,’ Julia said defensively. ‘It was such a pity he and Meryll separated.’

‘Oh?’ said Hilda, with interest, ‘so he did have a wife once then?’

Julia was conscious that she had unwittingly released a cherished piece of information. She could see Hilda assimilating this new fact, carefully placing it in its missing position in the jigsaw.

The introductions, where Julia had not already met, were made by Hilda, who also provided additional material, in piercing asides delivered in a shearing whisper, such as ‘She sexes kittens’ or ‘She writes short stories’.

While Purvis stumped about serving the coffee and biscuits, they all talked about children and boarding schools and au pair girls and lawnmowers in a desultory way for a few minutes, like wrestlers searching for hand-holds. Julia began slowly to relax her clenched fingers. Perhaps it was going to be all right, after all. Julia mentally reproached herself; surely she ought to be able to handle a few wives for coffee.

‘Have you got any children, Julia?’ asked June, unsuspectingly finding the first hand-hold. She was the wife of an Instructor Lieutenant Commander and, like every other Schoolie’s wife in the Navy, wrote short stories for women’s magazines, or at least she wrote short stories and sent them off to women’s magazines. But June was unusual, indeed almost unique, in having just had one of her stories accepted for the first time, and paid for. Her family and herself were quite stunned by this event. Unused to such fame, and quite non-plussed by the alteration in her family’s attitude to her writing, June was not sure whether to act the part of the celebrity or not.

‘No, we never had any children,’ Julia said, shortly; she had said that so often she had long since stopped being defensive about it.