War Classics (8 page)

Rarely have I done anything so difficult as give a lightning sketch of English literature to men who have read nothing but sundry and rare passages of the Bible and the racing columns of the yellow press. Between their knowledge and mine a great gulf stretched. For them, it entirely passed their comprehension how anyone could be interested in a novel. Yet when, omitting all literary references, I told them the story of
Beowulf
, they asked for more. Alone of all the camps in the Area, this one unabashed for many months chose to remain in its blissful state of ignorance. Eventually, when even we were being demobilised, it suddenly professed a passion for arithmetic and actually did advance laboriously as far as vulgar fractions. The decision to learn, we found, was the thought of one bright spirit who hoped they might thus be able to circumvent the War Office in its nefarious designs – which of course were unquestioned – of docking arrears of pay when they were being demobbed. Spurred on by this hope, the whole camp devoted itself with acclamation to its arithmetic.

Circe had been replaced in her camp by a solemn young man who, as might have been expected, made no progress whatever. On the contrary, in addition to the rapidly dwindling list of would-be learners he forwarded to us every Saturday, he went near to losing the Hut itself. An overflowing canteen demanded it and the CC granted their request, and after an interval, provided for us a damp tent insecurely anchored in a sea of mud. After that, with what we considered astounding suddenness, under the circumstances, the attendance went galloping up.

‘Better go and see what's happening there,' said the Chief to me one day with a puzzled frown. ‘How a soaking tent that is half afloat can round up crowds like that, I can't understand.'

It was indeed half afloat, I realised, as I waded knee-deep through the mud, only hoping that the wind would not blow me headlong into it the next minute. I arrived at the tent – the guttering oil lamps had gone out and by the light of a single candle, the solemn-faced young man was propounding theories of the most advanced Socialism, thinly veiled as Social Economics. He regarded my arrival as inopportune. To do the men justice, they were just as ready to ridicule his points as to praise. They knew it was a forbidden subject, so human nature being what it is, they flocked to hear. To tell the truth, they never liked men instructors at any rate, and ours were never plums.

The solemn young man was hastily withdrawn and the Camp Commandant, being now very prickly – and righteously so – the Chief decided to send him Miss Mordaunt. It was a masterstroke and we had no more trouble there. When next I visited that camp, I crossed to the tent by a neat path of duckboard: there were chairs and a stove in the tent and oil lamps burning brightly – another tent next door served as lecture room, and both tents would have been huts, had not Miss Mordaunt intimated to the Camp Commandant that as long as the men were in tents, she preferred to be too.

Besides sending Instructors to the camps, we advertised ourselves and our classes at the School. Base Routine Orders were all very well, but they were the official organ and we were not at all likely to get eager students through them. So we made out bills – red and blue and green bills, with pictures, most enticingly got up. No such thing as English literature figured on those. I had learnt something from Private Nobbs. ‘Come and Learn how to Write a Story,' and under that head I read or told how the few best stories in English had been written. ‘French' did not need to be camouflaged as everybody – even the WAACs – wanted to learn it. But equally everybody thought a senseless language like that should be mastered in at most a fortnight. It was a clean waste of time to spend longer than that on it. ‘German' at this stage nobody wanted to learn, though, when the occupation began, we had floods of applicants for even a week's course. The Irish Guards indeed, sent up unpremeditatedly to Cologne, wrote eagerly back to Miss Mordaunt for German grammars, so anxious were they to learn. Bookkeeping and shorthand drew well – a very practical and prosaic audience this. Nothing exciting was ever known to happen there, except once when a Pitman shorthand class was provided temporarily with a Gregg shorthand teacher and the resultant tangle had to be unravelled by main force by the wrathful and returning Pitmanite. Then there was the singing class. No shyness to come forward here. The Base Commandant led the way and the entire Base seemed ready to follow him. It is not often you get the chance of yelling louder than your Commander and not being punished for it. So the choir grew and multiplied with a will, both as regards numbers and lung power, until in the end we had to borrow a hall for it, as no single room in School – to our relief – would hold the singers. ‘History' did not figure on any of the Bills under any disguise as nobody at the Base would ever consent to learn that. You see history consisted mostly of war and of that, past, present or future, they never wanted to hear again. The only exception was a small squat man, who came one late afternoon and asked for a lecture on Frederick the Great, to be delivered at once. That stumped us all. Eventually the Chief took it on as he had, in the remote past, done History at Oxford. He said that the man listened stolid and unmoved during the whole hour's discourse, and at the end, equally stolidly, picked up his cap and departed. We never fathomed why he had asked for it.

One item on the bills was ‘Commercial Geography' and though the lecturer for it was one of the best and a distinguished member of a Home University Staff, it failed to draw. After some thought we changed its title to ‘Mining Areas in the North of England', and the roll call leapt up. ‘Applied Art' despite its dull title, was a great success – partly because of its first-rate teacher, in peacetime design artist to the best jewellers' firms in London, Paris and New York – and partly because in it the men were taught to make something and anything they did with their hands was popular. Where they failed, of course, was in intellectual flexibility but that was only to be expected. Just as ‘Applied Art' drew crowds, so did ‘Motoring'. The War Office handed us over an old car and every morning from 8 to 10, relays of soldiers and WAACs – all hoping to earn their living by their new knowledge in the peace world – were instructed in the mechanics of Motoring.

Whenever a subject grew unpopular, we camouflaged its title. ‘How to Write Letters' and ‘How to Make a Language' introduced the study of grammar. But you can't do much with Latin or Greek – they refuse to be disguised. Still, I had pupils for both, all the time I was there – few certainly, but very earnest. They would trudge on the wettest of wet nights for nearly two miles for a lesson on a Latin declension; they were all married men with families, printers, gardeners and the like, and they never missed a lesson all the time I was there. I think they wanted to learn because it was such a relief to get into a beautiful house, quite away from the Army atmosphere – we were not official – and to hear nothing but English around them. They also liked having Englishwomen to talk to and they had more chance of that at the School than at the crowded canteen. Finally I do think they liked Latin – at any rate they liked its logic and they loved the beauty of the Greek script. One of them used to make me the most exquisite Greek exercises, simply by copying out sentences he hardly understood.

There were a few freak turns too. There was the gentleman who came to learn the violin every afternoon and squeaked unbearably in the process above our heads, and the smart young motor-despatch rider – South-American born – who wanted to keep up his Spanish. He was a problem. Our Spanish master had left and nobody then on the Staff knew any Spanish. The Chief hated to say, ‘No' and the boy was waiting. Such a nice-looking, pleasant-mannered boy! It was a shame to turn him away. I explained things to the Chief and he assented. So, with the boy's consent, I, not knowing the language myself, took on the Spanish. Latin and French and likewise Italian were part of my ‘star turn', so it did not take much ingenuity to learn a little more Spanish than he did. He could pronounce the thing and I knew the grammar and we got on famously. Latterly we used to read
The Scarlet Pimpernel
in Spanish together. It was the only book we could get, and he got it by scouring the whole countryside in his off hours on his motorcycle. Then there was the Australian doctor who wanted to learn Italian, as she was going to spend her leave in Italy, and who informed me with disgust on her return that she wanted no more lessons. Italy was a third-rate country and the Bay of Naples wasn't in the same street as Sidney Harbour. And there was the natty WAAC Commandant – also Girton trained – who came to read Italian, and the EFC [Emergency Fleet Corporation?] Captain who had been a year in Italy and whose Italian was better than mine.

But our prize lecturer was the philosopher who came out prepared to instruct the troops in the Psychology of Dreams. No one at all responded to his invitation on the bills, so we rushed him out to the canteens, on the well-known principle that if the mountains won't go to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. Of him more anon.

Talking of canteens, every cinema at every canteen filmed our bills night after night, and that, we thought, was the very last thing in the Art of Advertisement.

Two other things there were, which made an invariable appeal to all ranks and conditions of the Army – they were Shakespeare and the Old Testament. I have had the most enthusiastic letters from quite unexpected units about
Macbeth
, as if Shakespeare had done them a personal favour in writing the play. It was never possible to obtain any Shakespeare books from the canteen libraries – so great was the run on him – and we were never able to supply sufficient copies from our own store to satisfy the camps around.

The case with the Old Testament was different. I had few books and the men had none. Yet for any study of English we must read something good. No English prose writer – though we had the choicest passages culled for us by Dr Hadow in the one book at my disposal – would hold the men for more than a moment. They were all voted slow and some dead slow. At last in despair I hit on some of the Old Testament short stories. The result was a
succès fou
. It did not come from familiarity, for until I told them, few had any idea what book I was reading. Even then, when I explained that it was the best prose in the world – irrespective of its religious merits – they were rather pleased with themselves for having liked it. So we abandoned with one accord the eloquence of Coleridge, of De Quincy, even of Charles Lamb – whom they plainly thought a fool as well as a madman – in favour of the real stuff purveyed to us by the adventures of Joshua and the like.

1
.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dieppe attracted many artists. The house which Christina calls the School was known as ‘Blanche'. It belonged to Parisian artist Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942), and was nestled beneath the cliffs on what is now Rue Alexandre Dumas, overlooking that clear green sea. Blanche invited many models and artists to his home, including Renoir, and he photographed Degas here. The house no longer exists, having been badly damaged during the Second World War, but there is a photograph of it among the YMCA Archives. Male members of staff lived in the School, while Christina and the other women were billeted elsewhere to preserve respectability.

2
.  The Chief was the Sub-Director for the Dieppe area, Henry Brooke.

3
.  ‘Tommy cooker' – a small portable stove used by soldiers in the trenches.

4
.  The statue in memory of 1870 by sculptor Eugène-Paul Bénet is in the Place des Martyrs in Dieppe.

5
.  ‘
Poilus
' were the French infantrymen. Although she writes with her customary sense of superiority to all other races, Christina's description does emphasise the international nature of the Allied presence in France.

6
.  The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was a voluntary service established in January 1917 to free men up from non-combat roles such as cooks, telephonists and clerks.

7
.  Lord Northcliffe was the leading newspaper magnate of his day. As the owner of
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, he had huge political and popular influence.

8
.  Remount Camp – the Army Remount Service was responsible for supplying horses throughout the army. This particular camp was at Luneray, about 11 miles south-west of Dieppe.

T
here is a wise old nursery rhyme which says, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ Possibly the Authorities thought of that when they devised our life. At any rate they made our work as diverse as they could. As I sat one morning poring over the Chief’s mess accounts, I thought to myself that I still could not answer the query of the SNO at home – ‘Whatever are they sending you to France for?’ The school was empty, for it was after 10 and the men were away at their military duties. I was now billeted in a French family, and only the men Instructors, as well as the Chief, lived at the School.

It was thought a bright idea by the Chief that I should run the Mess and look after the French servants. Considering I had spent all my life being looked after in Universities, it struck me as rather funny. But I tackled it gaily. The Chief little knew that he was confiding his welfare to a Bluestocking who had never cooked a dinner in her life, and whose knowledge of how porridge should be made depended on what she remembered from the choruses of Aristophanes. But, being Scotch, she did know how it ought to look. ‘Our porridge is like soup,’ complained the Chief bitterly. ‘Marie Henriette might as well serve it up with the dinner.’ But Marie Henriette knew the technique and I the results desired, and after we had experimented one morning with a will, I decided the last way would do. The following morning, pan in hand, she met me at the School door. The pan was empty and she waved it like a flag. ‘The
Messieurs
have eaten all.’ So that was that.