Owning Up: The Trilogy (54 page)

Both objects I accomplished; the Baron staggered aboard, the watch accepted the cheese and I turned back towards the city in search of further adventure. As I walked across the quay I could hear, through an open porthole, the tones of ‘The Well-tempered Keyboard’, a proof that the Baron had reached the Mess Deck. As to what I still expected of the night I had no firm idea – perhaps the Mona Lisa of the twentieth century had made some vague promise to fob me off. What I finished up with was a ballet dancer in a white mackintosh, a deceptively young man with remarkably bad teeth. His name was Hans and he invited me back to his flat, where he produced a bottle of Madeira, a coincidence which, in my state of heightened alcoholic consciousness, seemed disproportionately significant. It was clear that he had hoped for rougher trade than I, but we had quite a cosy time and, as the level of the Madeira fell, he became increasingly confidential. He clearly regretted, if for personal reasons, the departure of the occupying forces and he showed me several photographs of handsome young Germans both in and out of uniform affectionately inscribed. I found this perversely fascinating, but was even more intrigued when he searched out several propaganda gramophone records made by a German swing band called Mister Charlie, with the lyrics in English. There was one about Churchill. It went:

He helps the Jews

He’s a friend of the USSR

He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,

The man with the big cigar.

The backing, although a shade ponderous, wasn’t too bad; the trumpet player patently influenced by Nat Gonella.

At first light I left Hans, snoring gently, to his dreams of blonde Aryan beasts and caught a tram back to the dockyard. Going back on board I discovered I had precipitated a crisis. The dog watch had forgotten to tell the morning watch about the cheese and they’d been terrified out of their wits, believing it to be a bomb. I apologised, collected it, and went below for breakfast.

After acting out the naval formula for facing the day: a shit, a shower and a shampoo, I changed my socks, pants and nautical tee-shirt, polished my shoes, ironed my silk and went to find Felix and Edward.

We’d put in to see the funeral procession, which meant in effect a day ashore, and off we went. We caught a tram and Felix told us that it was essential we behave. It was, after all, he emphasised, ‘a solemn and portenious occasion’. We immediately, including him, began to giggle helplessly. It didn’t matter though. Everybody on the train and indeed throughout the city was incredibly cheerful, laughing and joking as though off to a wedding. We passed the Danish Horse Guards on their way to join the procession. In their dusty blue uniforms they looked like the chorus from the touring company of an under-budgeted production of
The Student Prince.

On reaching the centre of the city we sat down in a café to an enormous second breakfast and almost missed the procession. A slow march in the street reminded us of why we were not aboard. The coffin was passing on its gun carriage. Our marines, we decided, were as smart and co-ordinated as automatons, the French chic but casual. I hummed a music hall song I’d found on an old 78 record in a junk shop in Weymouth, ‘Ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead!’

Felix admitted, rather shyly, that it was his twenty-first birthday. We went back to the ship. I borrowed some money to take him and Edward out to a celebratory dinner, and we gorged like boa-constrictors and drank like fishes.

The measured strains of Johann Sebastian greeted me as I returned to my Mess Deck. The Baron was back too, and in good spirits. He had spent the evening, he told me, ‘hanging out of a fifteen-year-old party in a tent’. She spoke no English but had apparently expressed her enthusiasm by singing throughout the repetitive phrase ‘Hey-bob-a-rebob’, a rhythmic cry taken from a recording by Cab Calloway which was very popular at the time.

We sailed in the morning. The passage back was rough and Felix’s birthday dinner was lost over the side. We docked in Portsmouth on Saturday morning and I resumed my broken leave.

The cheese was a great success. My father’s mother, a forceful old lady, came as usual to Sunday lunch and, on seeing the Danish Blue, was beside herself with envy. She had been brought up by her grandmother on the Cheshire marshes and was given to old-fashioned expletives of an eighteenth-century flavour.

‘Dash m’ wig!’ she snorted. ‘Where did you get that cheese?’

From that day on, my father always referred to cheese as ‘Dash m’ wig’.

My leave over, I returned to the
Dido
and we resumed our purposeless meandering along the south coast until it was time for the summer cruise: a visit to Guernsey followed by a ‘goodwill’ tour of Scandinavia. It was now spring, and, in recompense for the arctic winter, both warm and beautiful. There was very little to do. We painted ship, skived as much as we could, and envied those who left to be demobbed.

Warrant Officer Perkins decided that it was high time to have another shot at getting me into trouble. As I’ve mentioned earlier I had stuck on the inside of my locker a reproduction of Magritte’s
Le Viol.
Perkins, passing one day when my locker door was open, decided it was obscene and reported me for displaying it. Next day, just before noon, I was sent for by the Commander, who felt obliged to see if the charge was justified. I opened my locker door and, controlling his amusement with some difficulty, he asked me to explain it. I was only too eager to oblige. Did it provoke desire, I asked rhetorically, lust? Surely not. Compared with the pin-ups on my shipmates’ locker doors it was infinitely less aphrodisiac. Magritte’s purpose in painting
Le Viol
was… I was all set to launch into a lengthy analysis of the painter’s intentions when the Commander, with the thought of a pink gin in the ward-room rapidly gaining the ascendancy, cut me short.

‘I really don’t think, Warrant Officer Perkins, that in this case…’ I stood there, finding it hard not to register my pleasure at my enemy’s discomfiture.

‘You may go, Able Seaman Melly.’

‘Ordinary Seaman, Sir.’

He looked surprised, asked me how long I had been in the Navy and said he would look in to why I hadn’t been promoted. As a result, a week later, with the helpful recommendation of the Leading Seaman of F Mess, I was made Able Seaman, and backdated six months with quite a lot of pay.
Le Viol,
much to the indignation of Warrant Officer Perkins, continued to smile hairily if enigmatically at the ship’s company every time I opened my locker door.

Despite this shot across my bows, and its unexpectedly helpful outcome, I in no way kept what is now called a low profile. On the contrary I decided to attempt an extremely provocative and perhaps, up until that time, unprecedented feat: to have the religious denomination on my naval papers altered to ‘atheist’, and to be given permission not to attend church parade. My reasons for this were part irritation, part genuine conviction, and certainly part exhibitionism. My strategy however was the opposite of Surrealist intransigence. I went to see the Chaplain, a reasonable young Welshman with whom I had a rather friendly relationship. To him I put it that as a sincere Christian it was surely as offensive for him to realise that a non-believer was being forced to pay lip-service to what he believed in, as it was for me to pretend to worship something I had no faith in whatsoever. He was entirely convinced by this argument and agreed to be called in my defence when I appeared in front of the Commander on ‘requests and defaulters’. It went extremely well and the only concession that I was forced to make was the definition of my non-belief as ‘agnostic’ rather than ‘atheist’ which I’d asked for. My papers were solemnly and officially changed – ‘Religious Denomination: Agnostic’ – and I was excused church parade.

Warrant Officer Perkins, a keen non-conformist, thought to punish me for this impertinence. He told my Chief Petty Officer that, on his orders, I was to clean out the heads during the service. I wasn’t taking that lying down. I went screaming to the Chaplain – Wasn’t it a further insult to his faith to equate it with cleaning out latrines? He was nearly as angry as I was and went to see the Commander. The order was countermanded and I was free to sit, I must confess smugly, reading the posh papers and listening with some pleasure to the distant singing of Anglican hymns, for which, like Sybil, I had always preserved a nostalgic affection.

The reactions of the ship’s company were variable. Predictably the Baron thought it well worthwhile. Despite his love of Johann Sebastian, he was a true iconoclast and the only religious observation I heard him utter was when the Tannoy, early one Sunday morning, announced ‘Holy Communion on the recreation space’, he asked the mess if ‘anyone fancied going up for a wet (drink)’. Others, either from conviction or convention, were shocked in varying degrees, the majority were indifferent, but the most surprising reaction came from the ferocious, bearded Master at Arms. Passing his caboosh (small office), once again crowded with woolly animals, I was startled to be called by name.

‘I hear,’ he said, sewing boot-button eyes on a puce duck, ‘that you’ve had your religious denomination changed to agnostic’

I explained that I asked to be described as an atheist but had been forced to accept the less definitive description.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said, biting off the thread, ‘that you ‘ad the intelligence to be fuckin’ atheist. Now piss off.’

I went away glowing with that special pleasure that comes from the favourable opinion of someone you fear.

Sex on the
Dido
was comparatively low key but uncensorious. There were a few obvious homosexuals, the doe-eyed writer for one, many total heterosexuals, and a fair number of those who would, on a casual basis, relieve sexual pressure with their own sex. It was accepted, for instance, on my Mess Deck, that on Saturday make and mends (half days off) anyone who fancied some mutual masturbation would crash down in the coat locker, a structure of closely-meshed wire like a medium-sized cage. As an open part-time invert I was often solicited on these occasions and usually accepted. Sometimes my masculine role both surprised and disappointed those who had misread my predilections. Mostly, however, it was no problem, and there was as relaxed and tolerant an atmosphere as any I’ve encountered. I had a sometime affair with a Corporal of the Marines who shared my watch on the Quarter Deck, but this was only in the middle watch and mostly, from his point of view anyway, to allay boredom. I think he really preferred our other pastime, which was to raid the officers’ galley for bacon, eggs and sausages and fry-up on our electric fire laid dangerously on its back. Sex was not really an issue on the
Dido.
There was much the same atmosphere as at a fairly easy-going public school.

On shore of course the Baron, and those like him, picked up women and, being far from discriminating, would return on board most mornings boasting of some fairly grotesque conquest.

I had resumed diplomatic relations with Tom, but mostly only in respect to our jazz sessions, and I seldom went ashore with him. For Felix, on the other hand, my friendship had grown warmer and I was very pleased, while anchored at Weymouth, when he asked me to go home with him. His father lived in a village not far from Dorchester, a suitable place for his retirement as it was near enough to the sea to add a tang of salt to the air. Here, berthed in an early nineteenth-century Gothic rectory with fine no-nonsense Georgian furniture and portraits of earlier nautical Aylmers on the dining 1room walls, he was in a position to play squire with stick and spaniel.

‘Treacle,’ he’d shout at the dog: ‘Come here! Here, boy! Heel!’ and to the farm labourers: ‘Pigs all right, John?’

His wife was like a character out of a play by the then popular dramatist, Esther McCracken, slightly eccentric, rather careless in appearance, given to saying the first-thing that came into her head, and extremely kind and easy-going.

There were strawberries and Devonshire cream for tea, sea trout for dinner and, on my first visit, another retired sea-dog and his wife were staying in the house.

‘My father’s last words,’ he told us over the brandy, ‘were: “for God’s sake, m’boy, always dress for dinner” and he was right. It stands for such a lot.’

Felix and I exchanged sardonic glances, resorting to that peculiarly English defence-mechanism by which we can accept what we know to be indefensible. At a village fete the following week our satirical aloofness was put further to the test. Here were feudal privilege, archaic prejudices, forelock tugging, and paternalism rampant, but here too were an organic wholeness, a sense of responsibility and a human scale. Confused by our responses, we concentrated on the more absurd aspects – not that this was difficult.

Through the crackling public address system the local Canon announced the loss of two dogs: ‘Such jolly little fellows. One little chap is called Nelson and his brother is Rodney.’

It was evident that Admiral Aylmer was not the only ex-Navy’ officer to have hove to thereabouts. There were pro-blood sport pamphlets in the temporary lavatory, and almost exaggeratedly Hardyesque rustics in charge of the stalls. Best of all there was a play, acted by the village children with a touching lack of talent and Dorset accents as rich as clotted cream: ‘Furry Bluebell, moi dear, oi wonder whurr her Majesty can boie?’

‘I find country life a dangerous seduction,’ I told Felix on our way back to the
Dido,
and he agreed. Certainly when at home he took on much of the texture of his parents’ life, bringing me out what he called ‘a stiff whisky to keep the cold out’ when I was finishing a sketch in the garden and acknowledging the respectful greetings of the villagers to the manner born. Yet both of us believed in a fairer, more egalitarian society where greetings were an equal acknowledgement of shared humanity and not an outward sign of social status. My own mixed feelings were based on flimsier foundations. My father, despite a lifetime spent of necessity in a Liverpool office, had a yearning for the life of a modest country gentleman, a taste he was only able to fulfil under the aegis of his rich uncles. Most summers they would ‘take a place’, and round them would gather the more impoverished members of the family to shoot the moors or fish the river. As a child on warm Welsh evenings, beating the pine woods to drive the clattering pigeons towards my father’s gun or watching him cast over the river Clwyd, I too fell in love with the idea of such a life. I inwardly envied Admiral Aylmer his ordered life and small domain.