The Day Gone By (44 page)

I wouldn't mind having those months over again; not only for our travelling adventures, but simply for the enjoyment of the comradeship of ‘the gang of four'. I've never experienced anything quite like it since, for it was in its nature a product of the strange journey we were on, with all its new experiences and unforeseeable encounters.

We sailed from the Clyde. Our ship was called the
Nea Hellas.
She was a Greek passenger ship which had been at sea when Italy fell upon Greece, and had at once sailed to put herself at the disposal of the Allies. She formed part of a big convoy, escorted by destroyers. Our voyage took place at the height of the German U-boat campaign - the Battle of the Atlantic. It was quite on the cards that one or other of the convoy ships might be torpedoed, but in the event none was. We weren't apprehensive; we felt confidence in those distant, greyhound-like destroyers we could watch from the deck, speeding around us and signalling to one another.

The food was excellent. Furthermore, this was before the days when all troopships went ‘dry'. There was a considerable amount of drinking aboard the ship - among the officers, that is. A lot of people were overspending their pay, and I recall a poker school, consisting mostly of R. A.M.C. officers - doctors, in fact - in which disconcertingly large sums changed hands. There were no women on board; not even a nurse.

We sailed far out into the Atlantic; almost to within sight of America, a steward told me. This was to elude the U-boats. Then we returned eastwards and so came at length into tropical waters and to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where we remained for a few days. It was swelteringly hot, and humid as a Turkish bath. No one was allowed ashore. The garish little town was half-concealed by rolling clouds of vapour, and above it hung the mountainous forests, matted, shaggy green - greener than anything I had ever seen - like a shapeless giant sprawling prone, head hung down over the minuscule men and their tiny boats dotting the harbour. The still, green jungle looked vast, dwarfing everything else, rendering humanity itself futile. It must have looked no different to the first Portuguese navigators. I was glad when we left and sailed south for Cape Town.

At Cape Town, we knew, we were going to disembark and in due course board another ship to sail up to Suez. There would be shore leave while we were waiting. The prospect was exciting. The ship's stewards spoke highly of Cape Town: it was a great place to have a good time, and September was the best of all months to be there. We received plenty of gratuitous advice about shops, restaurants, clubs, etc. I have always remembered Roy Emberson's reply to this. ‘Just give me Cape Town,' he said. ‘I'll do the rest.'

One morning very early, I was surprised - and rather annoyed — to be woken in my bunk by Roy. His
sang-froid habituel
seemed for the moment to have left him. He was urgent and animated. ‘Come up on deck, Dicky.
Now!
You've
got
to see it!'

It was easier to do as he said. We all went up on deck. The ship was lying in Table Bay. Some way off was Cape Town itself, dusky in twilight. Beyond and above rose the long, level line of Table Mountain, dominating everything below. Behind it and up to the zenith, the whole sky was aflame. The cirrus clouds looked like great crimson brush-strokes, flake upon burning flake. We were arched over by this luminescent, glowing vault. The steep face of the mountain, still in shadow, and the fiery sky formed a setting for the smokeless, motionless city itself, its buildings slowly revealed as white - white upon white - bigger and smaller blocks of white, as the light grew and fell upon them, first the shoreward and gradually those on the farther slope. Upstanding to the right was Lion Rock, itself a smouldering red.

This was our first sight of the famous city where none of us had ever been before; the city which, in prospect and our imagination, promised every sensuous pleasure attainable by young men. The four of us stood together, breathing the scented air wafted from the shore. Hibiscus? Frangipani? Gardenia? Bougainvillea? I didn't know then which were scented and which weren't, and didn't care, in that silent resplendence.
I thought,
This was what it meant! We had been led to expect something exciting and beautiful, but nothing approaching this.

That morning, as we lay to in the bay, I composed a lyric for the occasion - one purposely devised in Embersonian idiom.

Roy Emberson's Song about the Cape

Heads down, forwards!

Sweet and low!

The white town shining like a fall of snow.

All the land of evergreen,

Royal with sunlight, rich, serene;

Everything you've never seen.

Now the shore leave's through, and so

Where's the girls?

What do you know?

Rock it out, boys, let it go.

Tonight the war is gilt and gloss,

Crimson flowers and Southern Cross.

On the Mountain, cloud-mist swirls:

Harbour-lights a nest of pearls:

All the drink and all the girls.

Come on, lads, let's see you move!

Don't it grip ya, ain't it smooth

On the batter, in the groove?

When the Stukas rock the floor,

Boy! You'll wish you'd drunk some more.

When the grade gets really tough,

Think your lust was slight enough.

Get stuck in and grab the stuff!

Soft, sweet Cape and all that's there,

Flame hibiscus, golden air,

Country for a millionaire!

And tomorrow's grey and rough.

Later that day we went ashore, equipped with passes which were valid until two a.m.

It was that very evening, in Cape Town, that I made, by pure luck, one of the enduring and truly rewarding friendships of my life. It came about like this. At that time, with troopship convoys bound for the Middle East not infrequently putting in at Cape Town, the native British (in contradistinction to the Boers) were all keen to show hospitality and warmth to Allied soldiers. A considerable crowd of people were waiting actually on the harbourside to welcome the soldiers as they came ashore and invite individuals to their homes. As officers we, of course, hung back from this amicable melee; but we were soon told of other arrangements which had been made for us: namely, the Convoy Dance.

At that period of the war — when the Middle East Force (though we didn't know it, of course) was being heavily reinforced and built up for the El Alamein offensive — whenever a convoy stopped at Cape Town, all officers were
ipso facto
invited to what became known as the Convoy Dance at a big country club called the Kelvin Grove. Kelvin Grove is - or was at that time - a beautiful place, with a dining-room, a ballroom, bars, a swimming-pool, extensive gardens - the lot. In my memory it remains - for I went there only once - rather like the wonderful place where Le Grand Meaulnes found himself at the magic party. All that needs to be said is that all four of us found ourselves having the time of our lives. Roy Emberson remained, as usual, of self-assured and quiet demeanour, but I reckon even he was pleasantly startled. The girls were as delightful as the gardenias and the moonlight. There can be few places as beautiful as South Africa in September.

It was getting on for late in the evening when I, strolling happily along a corridor near the ballroom, came upon a pretty, dark-haired girl in her mid-twenties. I passed the time of night.

‘Have you seen the Secretary anywhere?' she asked me.

‘I'm afraid I wouldn't know him if I saw him.'

‘Well,' she said (she had a very pleasant, rather firm contralto voice which suited her well), ‘it's like this. Earlier this evening, I gave a bottle of gin I've got to the Secretary and asked him to look after it for me, and he locked it up in the safe in his office. If I could only find him, I could get it out.'

I should explain that in those war-time days, if you were lucky enough to get the chance to buy a bottle of gin, whisky, etc., you latched on to it tight and made damned sure nobody snitched it. There wasn't much more, you see.

I gladly joined the girl in her search. Her name was Muriel. (It wasn't, actually.) Her family lived in Cape Town: that is to say, her mother did; her father was dead, but she had two elder brothers. As we went on conversing, it became clear to me that this was a cultured, educated lady; a bit different from Roy Emberson fodder. I took off my Harlequin mask, dropped my Harlequin persona, told her my name was Richard (not Dicky) and steered the conversation on to T. S. Eliot. We got on well.

‘And what's more,' said Muriel, ‘my brother's a
real
poet. His poetry's published by Faber.'

This was a time - the 'thirties had, indeed, been a decade - when Faber and Faber were the avant-garde publishers of the widely read and successful poets of the day: Eliot, Ezra Pound, Auden, Spender, Isherwood (not a poet), MacNeice and others. In those days contemporary poets were more widely read than they are now, and their names were names to conjure with.

‘Who is he?' I asked, wide-eyed.

‘George Shaw,' replied Muriel.

This gave me a considerable jolt. I knew the name of G. D. Shaw (which I've been asked to alter) well enough, for it appeared among the Faber poets whose books were listed on the backs of the dust-jackets of the poetry of Eliot, Auden and the rest; however, I hadn't as yet read any G. D. Shaw, for my funds at Oxford had been a bit limited for buying books, though I was up-to-date in possession of Eliot, Auden
(Look, Stranger
and
Another Time)
and MacNeice (
Plant and Phantom),
And here was G. D. Shaw's sister, talking to me and looking for a bottle of gin. I was only twenty-two and had never met any of the recognized modern poets, but was myself full of aspirations; and furthermore, had been starved of any real intellectual company for more than two years past.

Muriel Shaw has remained one of my dearest friends. We were never lovers and never looked to be: but how much wisdom, understanding, support, discriminating advice, sensible criticism and warm encouragement I have received from Muriel during the past nearly fifty years I cannot begin to measure.

We duly found the Secretary and the gin, tracked down Roy and the others with the girls they had met, and went on to a night-club. When we parted, Muriel left me her address and telephone number; the other girls did the same and dispersed to their homes. (This was long before the days when even a Roy Emberson could expect to sleep with a girl the first night he met her.) It was now after two a.m. - no good going back to the ship - and the four of us began to look around for somewhere to sleep.

We came to a hotel and went in. But we had fallen into a common error of strangers in Cape Town - that of assuming that everyone was friendly. This particular hotel turned out to be very Boer. Only the night porter was around, and he was hostile and unhelpful. No rooms, no nothing. This annoyed Roy, who finally said he was going to sleep there anyway, and laid himself down on a sofa in the foyer. Paddy and Piggy followed suit. The porter said he would call the police. Roy said Let him. At this point I had nasty visions of Boer policemen returning us in handcuffs to O.C. Troops on the
Nea Hellas,
and, having failed to persuade any of my friends to join me, set off on my own.

The porter followed me. He didn't try to restrain me or grapple with me. He simply followed me wherever I went. We wandered out for miles into the suburbs. It had now grown fully light. Finally I got a few yards in front of him and pulled myself up and over a high fence. This defeated him. I found myself in somebody's garden and walked out of it into the road. Then I strolled back into town, had breakfast at a hotel and after sitting in the sunshine until about ten o'clock, telephoned Muriel.

Muriel said Would I like to come and see her, and off I set. We spent a delightful day at her home and addressed ourselves, amongst other things, to the matter of my pass from the ship, which had now, of course, expired. It said two a.m. all right, but it bore yesterday's date. With infinite care we went about erasing that date so that no one could possibly perceive that it had been interfered with. We used a penknife, scraping very, very lightly. We used breadcrumbs, too. It reminded me of the bit in Edgar Allan Poe when the chap says it took him a whole hour to open the door of his sleeping enemy's bedroom and put his head round it. Finally we put in today's date, counterfeiting the adjacent writing very deftly and using a similar pen. No one could have detected the forgery. After that we went swimming, lay on the sand and talked about Yeats.