Good Enough For Nelson (5 page)

‘Then you can teach them. It will be a thrill for them to learn. You fix it.’

They stood to attention as The Bodger and Jimmy went out. ‘You’re certainly causing ripples already, Bodger.’

The Bodger was struck by sudden remorse. Surface effects were only too easy to generate. ‘One has to let them know one’s here, Jimmy.’

‘Oh I think they know you’re here all right, Bodger.’ Jimmy looked again at his watch. ‘Time to go and meet the Prof., if that’s all right with you?’

‘Hell’s teeth, of course. He’s still here?’

‘Still here.’

‘Ye gods, that must be about forty years.’

The Senior Tutor, traditionally known as the Prof., was not nearly as big a fool as he looked, indeed he was no sort of fool at all. For the sake of appearances, he affected the vague manner, the stuttering speech and the abstracted expression of the absent-minded professor. To his naturally white flowing hair and studious appearance, he added shaking hands and a stooping back, to make himself seem old and decrepit; no man, however old or decrepit, could ever have been as old and decrepit as the Prof. made himself look. This he did out of deference to the College, for he knew that naval officers liked to feel superior to schoolmasters, and he had found that it paid to pander to this preference. A natural sense of ordained superiority, the Prof. believed, was an essential in a career naval officer, just as essential as the broad stream of philistinism which ran, deep yet clear, gentle yet not dull, beneath the everyday attitudes of College life. But, as a perpetual reminder of what he was doing, the Prof. had cut out, many years before, and had permanently placed in a prominent position on his desk, a framed strip cartoon from a newspaper. The first drawing showed a missionary watching disapprovingly a band of natives dancing round a cooking pot. In the second drawing, the missionary was attempting to convert the natives from dancing round the cooking pot. In the third and last drawing, the missionary himself was leading the dance.

The Prof., as a classicist at Dartmouth, was well aware that he was subjecting himself to two very powerful influences; close and prolonged proximity to the Royal Navy and to Greek tragedy would eventually cause even the most saintly temperament to take a low view of human life and motives. The Prof. skirted round the dangers he ran. Sometimes in a lecture he would draw whimsically erudite comparisons between graffiti in the College heads and certain passages in Aristophanes, but that was as far as he went. As a scholar, the Prof. knew himself to be mediocre. But as an administrator, a scholastic innovator, a social historian, and a judge of other teachers, he was masterly. When he interviewed a lecturer for one of the rare posts that fell vacant at the College he looked for the man who stood intellectually aloof; any man who openly expressed enthusiasm for the Navy, the Prof. believed, would never prosper.

The Prof. never forgot a face, just as he never mislaid an examination result or a termly report. Did The Bodger wish to know what marks he had in his fourth term history test? The Prof. could produce them. Did Jimmy Forster-Jones wish to know what his mathematics tutor had said of his progress thirty years before? The Prof. could turn it up. At first quite unsolicited and unwanted by himself, but later welcomed, the Prof. had achieved a curious position of being the keeper of the College memory. Every officer, in some way, looked back to Dartmouth. It was where they had all begun to leave naval records, lying in the past like deep geological strata, and thus they all had a common reference point in the sardonic, never- changing figure of the Prof. always ready with reminiscences, always a constant standard against which the present could measure the past. In a service where three years in one appointment was considered a long time and a man of forty was thought ancient, the Prof. grew ever more important as time went by.

The Prof. had recently been undergoing a crisis in his private life. His wife had died in circumstances which mocked his beliefs. After years of uncomfortable coexistence, they had agreed to part, possibly to get a divorce. Afterwards they had been working amicably together in the garden, repairing a wall, when it collapsed. His wife was killed by the falling brickwork. The Prof. thought of himself as a Christian, but this event had tested his faith unbearably. His grief was complicated by his anger over his son, who had defied his father and joined the Navy. The Prof. disapproved of, even despised, the Navy as a career for an intelligent man. The boy was intelligent and knew his father’s views. But he had joined all the same and was at that moment under training at the College, as a university entry. The Prof. saw his son from time to time, but could not bring himself to speak to him, or even to acknowledge him.

Now the Prof. was face to face with yet another new Captain of the College, the sixteenth--or was it the seventeenth?--since he came to the College himself. He knew they were generally capable officers. Their Lordships did not normally send one of their professional idiots to Dartmouth. The new man would naturally have all the qualities necessary to bring him to the rank of four-ring captain, but what would make him more interesting to an inveterate Navy-watcher like the Prof. was the fact that he must, by virtue of his appointment, represent all that was currently desirable in a naval officer, so that the young could, presumably, model themselves upon him. The Captain of Dartmouth was,
ex officio
, fashionable.

This one, the Prof. could see at once, perhaps looked a little more intelligent than usual, certainly a little more battle-scarred, noticeably more wary. He might be a worthwhile opponent. The Prof. had already looked up The Bodger’s academic records and discovered, not for the first time, how limited his information really was. There was hardly ever anything in a man’s Dartmouth results to indicate his future in the Service. Full many a full admiral had blushed unseen at Dartmouth.

The Bodger and the Prof. shook hands cautiously, each aware of the other, as deep recognised deep.

‘L-l-l-let me see ... ah... see,’ said the Prof. laboriously. ‘You were Blake term. Thirty-eight or nine. Who was in your term that I would be likely to know?’

The Bodger stiffened. This sounded to him very like the classical ‘down-putting’ opening, implying that The Bodger himself had been something of a nonentity in his term and required to be related to someone else of the same vintage before he could become identifiable as an individual. If it were such an opening gambit, then The Bodger was equal to it.

‘I don’t know who I could suggest to you,’ he said, cheerily, ‘they all normally say they were in my term.’

The Prof. bowed to that reply, while The Bodger went on. ‘Tell me, did you ever finish your great edition of Aristophanes, was it? I remember you were going to do all his plays in twentieth-century dialect.’

The Prof. managed to conceal his amazement. ‘I-I-I-I’m very flattered you should remember,’ he said. ‘No, it was never completed.’

It had not only not been completed, it had never been properly begun, and The Bodger’s enquiry was a far more shrewd thrust than he knew. The man of action had, apparently artlessly, discovered the man of thought’s vulnerability. As a much younger man, when The Bodger in fact was still a cadet, the Prof. had indeed intended to make his scholastic reputation with a fresh edition of Aristophanes, recast in modern speech and with a modern gloss. But it had never gone further than some notes for a version of
The Clouds
, and now it never would. The Prof. made excuses, even to himself, but he knew that he had not published because he had been afraid to submit his scholarship to public scrutiny and criticism.

There was much for them both to discuss, on the syllabus, on the staff, on College life in general, but this would do for the present. Conscious that he had been left at a slight disadvantage, the Prof. still looked forward to working with The Bodger with an anticipation he had not felt for years.

Once more back in the lower corridor, The Bodger paused at the sound of funereal organ music. The College chapel lay at the far end. It was a sort of holy brick annex; with its high windows, high Anglican decoration, and ribbed and slabbed brick walls, the chapel represented the College architect in reverential mood. Inside, Monsignor the music teacher was thumbing desultory despairing chords from the organ. Like everybody else, Monsignor deplored the passing of the old entry schemes. In the old days, he could count on a few rousing choruses from
Pinafore
, some carols for Christmas, and even, once, excerpts from the St Matthew Chorale. Now, one never knew what musical talent would turn up from term to term. One midshipman had just told Monsignor that he had ‘cut a demo disc’ with a pop group.
Pop group
. Monsignor jabbed viciously at the keys. All those tremendous swelling choruses of ‘Ten Thousand Miles Away’, which had swung the British bluejacket and his officers across the world, had they all now dwindled to a broken, feeble voice piping a ‘demo disc’ of ‘Toot Me Lulu, With a Zulu Flute’? Monsignor bent on his keys, so that the whole chapel thundered with the organ’s desolate roar.

The Bodger had no need to ask Monsignor what was the matter. Ten minutes later, he came out of the chapel, gleefully rubbing his hands. That evening would witness the combined debuts, with nobody excused unless they were actually in the sickbay, of the Massed Port and Starboard Choirs of the Britannia Royal Naval College.

In a lecture-room off the same corridor, Mr Tinkle was lecturing on political history to a class of officers, mostly of fairly mature age, who were candidates for commissions from the lower deck. His class looked upon Mr Tinkle with a curious blend of respect, tinged with awe, for his intellect combined with good-humoured tolerance for his person. It was not often that serving naval officers met anybody who was so patently an intellectual Titan and a social troglodyte.

Mr Tinkle himself was wracked internally by raging misgivings about himself. Superbly confident of his intellectual prowess, he was still extremely sensitive about his height, which was five feet one inch, and about his full name, Lionel Tinkle, which he thought quite absurd. He was comparatively new to the College, having only been there seven years, and one of the trials of a newcomer he had found hardest to bear was the number of times the ridiculous polysyllables of his name had been bawled aloud, at staff meetings, at social gatherings of all kinds, and whenever he was introduced. The introducing voice seemed to him to speak in accents of ever-increasing clarity and mockery, until Mr Tinkle became quite neurotic about his name, to the extent that even now, seven years later, he dreaded every morning that he would come into his lecture room and find some scurrilous play on his name chalked up on the blackboard. Mr Tinkle could see it in his mind’s eye: it would begin, inevitably, Tinkle, tinkle, little chap...’. It had never happened yet, but Mr Tinkle daily feared it.

Mr Tinkle had never felt more ambiguously about the Navy than he did that summer. He had applied for his Dartmouth lectureship in a spirit of bravado. He had accepted it in a mood of rebellion. He now found that he enjoyed it, and could not have left of choice. But he daily braced himself for intellectual combat, only to find there was none. Nobody ever took him on. Intellectually, the College was a vacuum, a desert, a nothing. And yet he had found some naval officers deceptively naive. They talked a strange, primitive non-language which could nevertheless inflict a numbing defeat on the unwary. Mr Tinkle sometimes compared himself with the tutor of radical convictions employed by a rich and powerful Whig family in the early nineteenth century. He felt himself attracted by status and repelled by its ideology. No addict trying to break his habit ever struggled harder than Mr Tinkle against the temptations of romanticism, but he felt himself succumbing. He experienced this dichotomy of sensibility, as he himself put it, most acutely when he lectured, as now, to a class of men from the lower deck. They were his own mates, literally his own class mates, and his colleagues in the class struggle. He should warm to them. So why did he despise them? Why did he secretly hanker after what he thought of as ‘the old Navy’ and yearn to teach a class of Old Etonians? He was a socialist, and yet he remembered with longing and approval those tremendous words of Virgil’s with which his Oxford tutor had opened his first lecture on imperialism
. Tu regere imperio populus, Romane, memento.
Their confident iambics were the very motto of empire. Roman, remember your imperial destiny. Look to it, that you impose dominion over the peoples of the world. Those imperious syllables were only equalled in their arrogance by those infamous words written across the front of the College. But if he quoted them now, to this class, these cretins, these clod-hoppers, they would only gape at him.

Lionel Tinkle was more than usually pensive that morning. He now believed that he was in love,
mirabile dictu
, with a Roman maiden of the patrician class, the Assistant Captain’s Secretary, a Third Officer WRNS. Her name was Polly, and Polly was fair and rosy of face. Polly was peaches and cream. She smelt of cologne, and sprig muslin, and milk. Furthermore, her breasts nearly burst out of her uniform blouse, and the movements of her hips under her navy blue skirt made Lionel Tinkle break out in a sweat of longing. Lately, he had started to wake up in the middle of the night, chanting her name, as though responding to some call from somewhere up near the ceiling.

Mr Tinkle took up the little red book from his desk. ‘Let me read to you,’ he said, ‘the lesson for today. I quote. “History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just wars and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore the Communists of the whole world opposed that war.” Unquote. That, gentlemen, was from Mao Tse Tung’s
Selected Works
, from a piece called “On Protracted War” written in about 1938. Well, what do you think? Is he correct in what he says about World War I? Was it a war fought just for imperialist interests?’