‘Is he a good officer?’
‘Kenny? Yes. His Jocks like him.’
‘His what?’
‘His Jocks – his men.’
‘Oh.’ He frowned. ‘What about your Colonel?’
‘I’m sure he thinks Kenny’s a good officer.’ Indeed, Sir Gavin didn’t know about Highland regiments, where the opinion of the men is the ultimate test, and every colonel knows it. Sir Gavin chewed his cigar and then said:
‘You were a ranker, weren’t you? Very well – in Burma, would you have . . . accepted Kenneth as your platoon commander? ’
I mentally compared Kenny with the brisk young man who’d once challenged me to a spelling bee and caught me out over ‘inadmissible’, and who’d died in a bunker entrance the next day. A good subaltern, but no better than MacKenzie.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Kenny would have done.’
‘You think so?’ he said, and suddenly I realised he was worried about his son. In the Guards, he could have served with him in spirit, so to speak – but he didn’t know how Highland regiments were, he’d said. Did the boy fit into that almost alien background? Was he a good officer? Like Mrs McGilvray, he aye worried about him, if for a different reason. So it seemed sensible to start talking about Kenny, describing how he got on in the regiment, how he and his platoon sergeant, McCaw, the Communist Clydesider, formed a disciplinary alliance that was a battalion byword, recalling incidents in which Kenny had figured, our own companionship, things like that, no doubt babbling a bit, while Sir Gavin listened, and kept the decanter going, now and then asking a question, finally sitting in silence for a while, and then saying:
‘Well, I’m glad he’s all right. Thank you.’
It was two in the morning when we finally rose, port-bloated and drowsy-he must have been partially kettled, for he insisted on a frame of snooker with accompanying brandies before we parted for the night. ‘John’ll look after you,’ he said, hiccoughing courteously, and I was aware of a dim sober figure at the foot of the massive staircase, waiting to conduct me to my room – which brings me back, after this digression of homecoming, to where I was in the first place.
John was a footman, the only one I have ever encountered outside the pages of Georgette Heyer and Wodehouse, and he would have fitted into them perfectly, along with the rest of the MacKenzie menage. No doubt I was a trifle woozy with tiredness and Croft’s Old Original, but I have no impression that I had to stir so much as a finger in order to get into bed. His shadow flitted about me, my clothes vanished, towel and soap and warm water swam into my ken, followed by pyjamas and a cup of some bland liquid, and then I was between the sheets and all was dark contentment. When I woke two hours later there was a tray at the bedside with various mineral waters, biscuits, and a glass of milk, all under a dim night-light. I think the milk had been spiked, for the first two hours after waking next morning passed in a beatific haze; I seem to remember curtains being drawn and a cup of tea appearing, and then I was borne up gently into a sitting position and presently subsided, shaven, while a voice murmured that my bath had been drawn – not filled or running, you understand, but drawn. At that point he vanished, and when I emerged from the bathroom, more or less awake, there was a breakfast tray on the window table, with porridge and Arbroath smokies and ham and eggs and such morning rolls as God’s Own Prophet eats only in Glasgow bakeries; the Scotsman and the Bulletin lay beside it (not that I was fit for more than the Scottykin comic strip), my clothes were laid out, pressed, brushed, and beautiful, my shoes a-gleam, and even my cap badge and sporran chains had been polished.
This, it slowly dawned on me, was living, and it took an immense effort to decline the MacKenzies’ invitation to stay on, but I suspected that after a few days of John’s attention I would have forgotten how to tie my shoe-laces and wave bye-bye. As I travelled south again, and later on the flight to Cairo, I had day-dreams in which the press-gang had been reintroduced, and John had been crimped into my personal service; it would give me a new outlook on life, and I would rise effortlessly to general rank and a knighthood, possibly even C.I.G.S., for nothing less was conceivable with that mysterious retainer sorting me out; I would have to live up to the ambience he created. At that point the dreaming stopped, as I realised that I simply wasn’t made for that kind of destiny, or for the ministrations of people like John.
This was driven home with a vengeance in Benghazi, of all unlikely places, where I had to spend three days between flights on the way back to the battalion. I had just entered the room allotted me in the transit camp when there was a clump of martial feet on the verandah, and into the doorway wheeled a gigantic German prisoner-of-war. From the crown of his blond shaving-brush skull to his massive ammunition boots and rolled socks must have been a cool six and a half feet; in between he wore only tiny khaki shorts and a shirt which appeared to have been starched with concrete. He crashed to attention, stared at the wall, and shouted:
‘Saar, Ai em yewer betmen. Mai nem is Hans. Pliz permit thet Ai unpeck yewer kit.’
My immediate reaction was: how the hell did we ever beat this lot? For what I was looking at was one of Frederick William’s Prussian giants, the picture of a Panzer Grenadier, the perfect military automaton. He was, I learned later, captured Afrika Korps, waiting to be repatriated and meanwhile employed to attend transients like myself. When I had recovered and told him to carry on, he stamped again, ducked his head sharply, and went at my valise like a great clockwork doll, unpacking and stowing with a precision that was not quite human; it was a relief to see that there wasn’t a knob on the side of his neck.
It was my first encounter with the German military, and I didn’t mind if it was the last. In his heel-clicking way he was as perfect a servant as John had been, for while John had worked his miracles without actually being there, apparently, and never obtruding his personality, Hans succeeded by having no personality at all. It was like having a machine about the place, bringing tea by numbers; you could almost hear the whirr and click with every action. In fact, he was a robot-genie, with the gift of sudden shattering appearance; he would be out on the verandah, standing at ease, and if I so much as coughed he would be quivering in the doorway shouting ‘Saar!’, ready to fetch me a box of matches or march on Moscow. I began to understand Frederick the Great and Hitler; given a couple of million Hanses at your beck and call, the temptation to say ‘Occupy Europe at once!’ must be overpowering.
I say he had no personality, but I’m not so sure. In three days he never betrayed emotion, or even moved a facial muscle except to speak; if he had a thought beyond the next duty to be performed, you would never have known it. But on the last night, I had gone up to the mess in khaki drill, having left my kilt hanging by its waist-loops on the cupboard door. Coming back, I glanced in at my window, and there was Hans standing looking at the kilt with an expression I hadn’t seen before. It was a thoughtful, intense stare, with a lot of memory behind it; he moved forward and felt the material, traced his thumb-nail along one of the yellow threads, and then stepped back, contemplating it with his cropped head on one side. I may be wrong, but I believe that if ever a man was thinking, ‘Next time, you sons-of-bitches’, he was. I made a noise approaching the doorway, and when I went in he was turning down the bed, impassive as ever.
But whatever secret thoughts he may have had in his Teutonic depths, Hans, as a servant, was too much for me – just as the disembodied John had been. As I observed earlier, you have to be a Junker, or its social equivalent (with all that that implies) to be able to bear having the Johns and Hanses dance attendance on you; if you are just a gentleman for the working day, you must stick to your own kind.
I reached the battalion the following evening, asked the jeep driver to drop off my kit at my billet, and walked over to 12 Platoon barrack-room. They were there, loafing about, lying on their cots, exchanging the patter, some cleaning their kit, others preparing to go out on the town: the dapper Fletcher was combing his hair at a mirror, fox-trotting
on the spot; Forbes, in singlet and shorts, was juggling a tennis ball on his instep; Riach was writing a letter (to the Wee Frees’ Grand Inquisitor, probably) ; Daft Bob Brown was sitting on his bed singing ‘Ah’ve got spurrs that jingle-jangle-jingle, so they doo-oo!’ and at the far end Private McAuslan, clad à la mode in balmoral bonnet and a towel with which he had evidently been sweeping a chimney, was balanced precariously on his bed-end, swiping furiously at moths with his rifle-sling; from his hoarse vituperations I gather he blamed their intrusion on Sergeant Telfer, the Army Council, and the Labour Government of Mr Attlee. He and Sir Gavin MacKenzie should have got together.
One of the corporals saw me in the doorway and started to call the room to attention, but I flagged him down, and the platoon registered my appearance after their fashion.
‘Aw-haw-hey, Wullie! The man’s back!’
‘See, Ah told ye he hadnae gone absent.’
‘Hiv a good leave, sur?’
‘Way-ull! Back tae the Airmy again!’
‘Whit did ye bring us frae Rothesay, sur?’
‘Aye, it’ll be hell in the trenches the morn!′ and so on with their keelie grins and weird slogans, and very reassuring it was. I responded in kind by bidding them a courteous good evening, looked forward to meeting them on rifle parade at eight and kit inspection at ten, and acknowledged their cries of protest and lamentation. McGilvray came forward with my Sam Browne in one hand and a polishing rag in the other.
‘Yer leave a’right, sur? Aw, smashin’. Ah’m jist givin’ yer belt a wee buff – Captain McAlpine asked tae borrow it while ye were away, an’ ye know whit he’s like – Ah think he’s been hingin’ oot a windae in it; a’ scuffed tae hellangone! But the rest o’ yer service dress is a’ ready; Ah bulled it up when Ah heard ye wis back the night.’
Well, I thought to myself, you’re not John or Hans, thank God, but you’ll do. They can keep the professionals – and they can certainly keep McAuslan, and the farther away the better – and we’ll get by very nicely.
He was looking at me inquiringly, and I realised I had been letting my thoughts stray.
‘Oh . . . thanks, McGilvray. I saw your mother and great-uncle ; they’re fine. Come and finish the belt in my room and I’ll tell you about them.’ I was turning away when a thought struck me, and I paused, hesitating: I could sense that stern shade with her black ebony cane frowning down in disapproval from some immaculate, dusted paradise, but I couldn’t help that. ‘Oh, yes, and you’d better bring your socks with you.’
Sorry, Granny MacDonald, I thought, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
Captain Errol
Whenever I see television newsreels of police or troops facing mobs of rioting demonstrators, standing fast under a hail of rocks, bottles, and petrol bombs, my mind goes back forty years to India, when I was understudying John Gielgud and first heard the pregnant phrase ′Aid to the civil power’. And from that my thoughts inevitably travel on to Captain Errol, and the Brigadier’s pet hawks, and the great rabble of chanting Arab rioters advancing down the Kantara causeway towards the thin khaki line of 12 Platoon, and my own voice sounding unnaturally loud and hoarse: ‘Right, Sarn′t Telfer – fix bayonets.’
Aid to the civil power, you see, is what the British Army used to give when called on to deal with disorder, tumult, and breach of the peace which the police could no longer control. The native constabulary of our former Italian colony being what they were – prone to panic if a drunken bazaar-wallah broke a window – aid to the civil power often amounted to no more than sending Wee Wullie out with a pick handle to shout ‘Imshi!’; on the other hand, when real political mayhem broke loose, and a raging horde of fellaheen several thousand strong appeared bent on setting the town ablaze and massacring the European population, sterner measures were called for, and unhappy subalterns found themselves faced with the kind of decision which Home Secretaries and Cabinets agonise over for hours, the difference being that the subaltern had thirty seconds, with luck, in which to consider the safety of his men, the defenceless town at his back, and the likelihood that if he gave the order to fire and some agitator caught a bullet, he, the subaltern, would go down in history as the Butcher of Puggle Bazaar, or wherever it happened to be.
That, as I say, was in the imperial twilight of fifty years ago, long before the days of walkie-talkies, C.S. gas, riot shields, water cannon, and similar modern defences of the public weal – not that they seem to make riot control any easier nowadays, especially when the cameras are present. We didn’t have to worry about television, and our options for dealing with infuriated rioters were limited: do nothing and get murdered, fire over their heads, or let fly in earnest. There are easier decisions, believe me, for a youth not old enough to vote.
The Army recognised this, and was at pains to instruct its fledgling officers in the techniques of containing civil commotion, so far as it knew how, which wasn’t far, even in India, with three centuries of experience to draw on. Those were the postwar months before independence, when demonstrators were chanting: ‘Jai Hind!’ and ‘Pakistan zindabad!’, and the Indian police were laying about them with lathis (you really don’t know what police brutality is until you’ve seen a lathi charge going in), while the troops stood by and their officers hoped to God they wouldn’t have to intervene. Quetta and Amritsar were ugly memories of what happened when someone opened fire at the wrong time.
Bangalore, where I was completing my officers’ training course, was one of the quiet spots, which may have been why the authorities took the eccentric view that instruction in riot control could be imparted through the medium of the theatre. If that sounds unlikely, well, that’s the Army for you. Some genius (and it wasn’t Richard Brinsley Sheridan) had written a play about aid to the civil power, showing the right and wrong ways of coping with unrest; it was to be enacted at the garrison theatre, and I found myself dragooned into taking part.
That’s what comes of understudying Gielgud, which is what I like to think I had been doing, although he didn’t know it. In the last relaxed weeks of our officers’ training, a few of us cadets had been taking part in a production of The Harbour Called Mulberry for India Radio, with Cadet MacNeill as the Prussian general riveting the audience with his impersonation of Conrad Veidt; it was natural that when Gielgud’s touring company arrived in town with a double bill of Hamlet and Blithe Spirit, and some of his cast went down with Bangalore Belly, our amateur group should be asked to provide replacements in case they needed a couple of extra spear-carriers. I was fool enough to volunteer, and while we were never required even to change into costume, let alone go on stage, we convinced ourselves that we were, technically, understudying the lead players – I mean to say, Bangalore Belly can go through unacclimatised systems like wildfire, and in our backstage dreams we could imagine being out there tearing the Soliloquy to shreds while Gielgud was carted off to the sick-bay. He wasn’t, as it happened, but no doubt he would have been reassured if he’d known that we were ready to step in.
That by the way; the upshot was that, having drawn attention to ourselves, my associates and I were prime targets when it came to choosing the cast for the aid-to-the-civil-power play, a knavish piece of work entitled Nowall and Chancit. I played Colonel Nowall, an elderly and incompetent garrison commander, which meant that I had to wear a white wig and whiskers and make like a doddering Aubrey Smith in front of a military audience whose behaviour would have disgraced the Circus Maximus. The script was abysmal, my moustache kept coming loose, the prop telephone didn’t ring on cue, one of the cast who took acting seriously dried up and fainted, and in the last act I had to order my troops to open fire on a rioting crowd played by a platoon of Indian sepoys in loin-cloths who giggled throughout and went right over the top when shot with blank cartridges. The entire theatre was dense with cordite smoke, there seemed to be about seven hundred people on stage, and when I stood knee-deep in hysterical corpses and spoke my deathless closing line: ‘Well, that’s that!’
it stopped the show. I have not trod the boards since, and it can stay that way.
My excuse for that reminiscence is that it describes the only instruction we ever got in dealing with civil disorder. Considering that we were destined, as young second-lieutenants, to lead troops in various parts of the Far and Middle East when empires were breaking up and independence movements were in full spate, with accompanying bloodshed, it was barely adequate. Not that any amount of training, including my months as an infantry section leader in Burma, could have prepared me for the Palestine troubles of ’46, when Arab and Jew were at each other’s throats with the British caught in the middle, as usual; the Irgun and Stern Gang were waging their campaign of terror (or freedom-fighting, depending on your point of view), raid, ambush, murder, and explosion were commonplace, the Argyll and Sutherlands had barbed wire strung across the inside corridors of their Jerusalem barracks, and you took your revolver into the shower. It was a nerve-racked, bloody business which you learned as you went along; commanding the Cairo-Jerusalem night train and conducting a security stake-out at the Armistice Day service on the Mount of Olives added years to my education in a matter of days, and by the time I was posted back to my Highland battalion far away along the North African coast I felt I knew something about lending aid to the civil power. Of course, I didn’t know the half of it – but then, I hadn’t met Captain Errol.
That wasn’t his real name, but it was what the Jocks called him because of his resemblance to Flynn, the well-known actor and bon viveur. And it wasn’t just that he was six feet two, lightly moustached, and strikingly handsome; he had the same casual, self-assured swagger of the man who is well content with himself and doesn’t give a dam whether anyone knows it or not; when you have two strings of ribbons, starting with the M.C. and M.M. and including the Croix de Guerre and a couple of exotic Balkan gongs at the end, you don’t need to put on side. Which was just as well, for Errol had evidently been born with a double helping of self-esteem, advertised in the amused half-smile and lifted eyebrow with which he surveyed the world in general – and me in particular on the day he joined the battalion.