Good Enough For Nelson (18 page)

Buster delivered his distinguished passengers faultlessly and to the very minute on to a helicopter pad specially prepared from a car-park cleared of care.

There were four of them. The Field Marshal, who led the way, was a superb military figure, coal-black, over six foot and as broad as he was tall, wearing an olive-green uniform with bright red lapel tabs, polished brown leather belt, a white and green shoulder lanyard, silver epaulettes, and a gold ‘lightning conductor’ stripe down the sides of his trousers. Across his breast he wore an impressive row of medals, amongst them, The Bodger recognised, the 1914-18 Star, the Air Crew Europe Star, the Albert Medal, the Congressional Medal of Honour, and the Naval General Service Medal with a bar for the battle of Navarino. The Marshal of the Air Force was also coal black but was in pale washable Syllabub-blue with no medals but instead a huge pair of embroidered wings; from time to time he casually breathed on the knuckles of ‘his right hand and caressed his wings with them.

Neither the Field Marshal nor the Marshal of the Air Force had any English, but Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed, a paler man of a different tribe, spoke it fluently. He was, in fact, an alumnus of the College. His country had no corps of naval officers, nor indeed had it a navy; Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed was not only the senior, but also the only officer in his navy, and he was now present as interpreter.

The fourth visitor, Captain Cassidy-Jones, was a man whom The Bodger had heard of but never met and whom he disliked on sight. Visitors from the Ministry of Defence normally brought on what The Bodger called Nausea, and here, The Bodger could sense from the pricking of his thumbs, was the very Harbinger of Nausea. In those fiery-red cheeks, those hard blue eyes, in the set of that cap, The Bodger recognised an antagonist. He knew this type at a glance, as an ambitious thruster, who would feel he must go back to Whitehall with the scalps of some Devon yokels hanging from his belt.

‘Just down for the day from DPDSMPR (Navy), to keep an eye on things, you know,’ Cassidy-Jones said, giving The Bodger a piercing look. The Bodger wondered whether he was expected to faint dead away at those initials, which meant nothing to him. Evidently they stood for some Ministry department staffed by pointed-heads.

‘Glad to see you,’ said The Bodger, mendaciously.

The first part of divisions went according to plan. The band played, the visitors inspected, Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed interpreted, Cassidy-Jones grunted. Everything happened as it had happened a thousand times before. It was not until the divisions began to march past that the occasion deteriorated into what became known ever afterwards as Lord God Almighty’s Disasters. Divisions at Dartmouth was a ceremony so robustly structured, ritually and physically, that it was almost impossible for one man alone to disrupt the entire proceedings. But Syllabub managed it.

Syllabub was a very decent fellow, everybody agreed, with a good heart. But he simply had no idea about drill, no conception of the rhythms, angles, timings, patterns and relative movements required for divisions. At the same time, he had the courage of his convictions, to go his own way. He was therefore the most dangerous kind of man to have on a big parade, a man both absent-minded enough, and single-minded enough, to throw everybody else into disarray.

Syllabub was day-dreaming, when, as his own division began to march off, the officer in charge of an adjacent division shouted a very loud command close to Syllabub’s ear. Obediently Syllabub turned left, taking with him his own file which consisted of two officers from his own country. Finding themselves suddenly alone with Syllabub, these two were appalled by their own idiosyncrasy but they still followed Syllabub. They had been told, more often than they could remember, to take their time, dressing and direction from their right-hand man. Syllabub was their right-hand man, so they followed him. Syllabub’s little party marched smartly across the parade ground and attached itself to the left flank of the guard, who happened at that moment to be marching in the opposite direction past the saluting point.

The left flank of the guard did their best to discourage Syllabub, hissing furiously at him and elbowing him with their rifles, held at the slope. The officer who was left-hand marker of the guard indeed spoke harshly to Syllabub. But Syllabub, happy to have so quickly found another division to march with, clasped himself to them with bands of steel, and nothing could dislodge him.

The officer of the guard, who happened to be Bingley, did not notice Syllabub until he had looked to his front again after completing his sword salute. Bingley, too, began to whisper frantically out of the side of his mouth. Petty Officer Pounter began to make frenzied signals from the shelter of the armoury. Bingley could see, just by looking at his face, that Syllabub was not going to be diverted. Meanwhile a crisis was fast approaching for Bingley. He could not turn the guard to the left because of Syllabub, who might do anything on the command. He could not turn them right, because of the armoury wall. But looming up rapidly ahead was the wall at the end of the parade ground, with the ramp and the road above it. With terrifying speed time ran out and it was too late. The guard reached the wall and had perforce to begin marking time.

The officer in charge of the following division saw what had happened to the guard and turned his division precipitately left into threes to avoid them, but directly onto a converging course with another division still in line. For a brief time there was hope that the two would scrape clear, but the relative bearing remained constant and both divisions collided. They too began to mark time.

The following divisions now had no room to manoeuvre. They went as far as they could, and then marked time. The Royal Marine Band finished their repertoire and prepared to move off. Nothing and nobody had ever in living memory impeded the Band’s progress, so the Bandmaster, with centuries of victorious tradition
per mare per terram
behind him, launched his Band forwards, confident that by the time he reached the parade ground proper, the situation would have resolved itself in his favour. But it was not so. In another moment, the Band were also forced to mark time. Divisions were now locked solid. All ten divisions of OUTs, the guard, the band, the colour party, some five hundred men all told, marked time together, to the tune of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’.

Julia and Lucy were watching from a window. ‘I don’t think they usually do it like this,’ Julia said.

‘It looks a complete shambles to me,’ said Lucy, in a tone of voice which added, what can you expect from a post-imperialist, neo-fascist, elitist mob like that lot down there?

‘It’s a shame, poor Ikey Smith,’ said Julia. ‘This
would
happen when
he
was in charge.’

‘Oh, is he in charge?’ said Lucy, with interest. ‘That should teach him.’

Isaiah Nine Smith looked down at divisions from his position of command. As Julia said, they did not normally do it like this. There could be only one drastic solution. Isaiah Nine Smith gathered himself up for the most tremendous, climactically important single command he had ever given in his Service career.

‘Divisions... HALT!’

For a moment it seemed they had not heard him. But then, with a final crash of drums and stamp of feet, everybody stood stock still.

Isaiah Nine Smith felt the stress-sweat running down the backs of his legs. ‘On the command “Divisions, fall out”, everyone on parade, I say again,
everyone
, including the guard, including the band, and including the colour party, will turn left, break off, and double away to his position before marching off. On my command, Divisions
ready
, the divisions will march past in turn again. Divisions ... FALL OUT!’

The clumps of men broke up, the remaining patterns dissolved, as everybody doubled back to their starting positions for marching off. In a very few moments, all were ready again- all, except for Syllabub. Petty Officer Pounter reached out a long arm and plucked him from the hurrying stream and swiftly and silently carried him away, like a burglar pouching his swag, into the sanctuary of the armoury.

‘You just stay ‘ere, sir,’ growled Petty Officer Pounter. ‘It’s safer’. Without Syllabub’s maverick atom ricochetting around their molecular structure, divisions this time passed off without any mishap.

‘Well done, Ikey! ‘ said The Bodger, looking Cassidy-Jones defiantly in the eye.

The Field Marshal was beaming, and spoke at length to Sub-Lieutenant Ahmed.

‘The Field Marshal would like to say how much he enjoyed the war-dance, sir.’

‘War dance?’

‘Well, sir, the word the Field Marshal used is difficult to translate into English. In our language, it means war-dance, any energetic celebration, and it also has a religious meaning to it, sir.’

‘I must say,’ said The Bodger, ‘that’s the best description of divisions I’ve heard for a long time! ‘

The Bodger, Isaiah Nine Smith, and indeed the whole staff devoutly hoped that the incredible scenes during divisions would have exorcised any malignant spirits hovering over the rest of the events for the day. But their hopes were soon dashed. When Cassidy-Jones and the other visitors arrived on the jetty to catch the boat out to
Rowbotham
they were joined by a very young sailor leading Wilhelmina, who had been out for her morning exercise walk.

Cassidy-Jones glared at Wilhelmina. ‘Is that dog coming with us?’ he asked, perhaps rather more fiercely than he actually felt. But the dog was unusual, and Cassidy-Jones disliked anything unusual. Wilhemina, a sensitive personality, began to whimper and shiver.

The dilemma of Wilhelmina’s handler was plain enough. In front of him he had a four-ring captain with a most threatening manner. But beyond, out in the river, was
Rowbotham
and Tremendous Mackenzie, who would be expecting Wilhelmina to catch this boat and would be looking forward to having his dog back.

Wilhelmina solved the impasse by leaping into the stern sheets and standing there, howling continuously and unmelodiously, while the bowman and stem sheetsman let go and pushed the boat off. The motor-boat coxswain, Midshipman Smythe-Smith, a precious product of Winchester College, rather enjoyed boat driving, and fancied his own expertise at it. He liked to talk about what he called the nuances of boat-handling, the balancing of hydraulic and static forces, the solution of problems of momentum and kinetic energy. In spite of his subtleties, Smythe- Smith was only an adequate coxswain at the best of times, and this time the visitors, the occasion, and Wilhelmina were all too much for him. Totally misjudging his speed and angle of approach, he drove his boat into
Rowbotham’s
starboard gangway as though determined to tear its stanchions out of their sockets. The boat came to rest after an agonised screeching of wood, and metal and scraping of paint, with prolonged shouts of outrage from Tremendous Mackenzie above.

Cassidy-Jones was six months senior to The Bodger (he had checked it in the Navy List before leaving London) and he had been standing, poised and ready, to step off first. The impact pitched him forwards and downwards, to land on his hands and knees in the cabin, whilst Wilhelmina, her tail between her legs, slipped past him and bolted up the steps to safety.

‘Ladies first,’ said The Bodger sweetly.

Further forward and on the other side of the ship, the party of OUTs were disembarking with much less ceremonial from a drifter. The top of the drifter’s upper-deck bulwark was roughly level with
Rowbotham’s
iron deck and the OUTs had to leap across. All succeeded except one maladroit youth called Trubshaw who slipped and jammed his leg between the drifter and the destroyer’s ship’s side, and fell backwards, striking his arm against a hatch, with a cry of agony.

‘Mind the paint-work, you,’ said a small, sour-looking Petty Officer to Trubshaw, as he lay writhing on the drifter’s deck. ‘You coming, or aren’t you?’ Trubshaw collected himself and, white with pain, half hopped, half staggered across to
Rowbotham
.

‘Get fell in, three deep.’ The Petty Officer’s eye ranged along the ranks as hospitably as a laser beam. He watched his visitors shuffling about. ‘Chop chop, can’t wait all day while you ballerinas arrange yourselves in pretty patterns.’

‘I’ll say it once. I won’t say it again,’ he went on. ‘I’m the Chief Boatswain’s Mate of this ship. The Buffer, they call me. I’ve been told off to look after you lot today.’ The Buffer’s features showed no discernible sign of enthusiasm. He, too, faced a dilemma. These before him were officers under training-than whom, in the Buffer’s somewhat rigid view of the naval hierarchy, there were few lower forms of organic life. Yet some of those in front of him undoubtedly wore sub-lieutenant’s stripes, insignia which proclaimed them at least as proper officers. All this placed the Buffer in an ambiguous position, as though he were not sure whether or not to call an amoeba ‘sir’.

‘You’re not here to enjoy yourselves. If you want to enjoy yourselves, go ashore. While you’re on board, I’ll see you don’t enjoy yourselves. If you want to know anything, ask me. Don’t ask the sailors on board ‘ere. They’re as ignorant as you are. You will be divided into six watches, Red, Blue, White, Green, Yellow and Purple Watches, to do ship’s duties in rotation. Every hour, on the hour, you will ‘ear the pipe over the ship’s broadcast, HoUT watches, change round. You will then proceed in an orderly manner to your next place of duty. Any questions?’

The Buffer’s accent was providing Adrianovitch with a great deal of innocent merriment. ‘Ho ho ho ho HoUTs,’ he was chortling, under his breath.

‘You,’ said the Buffer, pointing at him. ‘Get down the boiler-room for the first watch. Any more questions. Right,’ the Buffer took up a list, ‘Red Watch to the bridge, Blue Watch to the fo’c’s’le. White Watch to the engine-room. Green Watch to the boiler-room. Yellow Watch to the wheel-house. Purple Watch to the quarterdeck.’

‘I say, what time will they be serving lunch?’ said Qureshi.

‘
Hands
will be piped to
dinner
,’ said the Buffer heavily, ‘at twelve, in the normal Service manner since time immemorial. HoUTs will have their dinners in what used to be the forward seamen’s messdeck in the days when we still ‘ad seamen. This ship is on the cafeteria system so you will
not
have your meals served with napkins and palm court violin music, you’ll all queue up and collect your own.’