The Light’s on at Signpost

  I left the Academy in the middle of the war, with no academic qualifications whatever, and only two prizes, for English and general knowledge—oh, and a cup for throwing the cricket ball. Whenever my eye falls on the general knowledge prize today (it was The Savoy Operas), I’m reminded of a splendid contest once held in the United States to find the champion of sheer trivia and useless information, the winner being presented with a plastic bucket while the assembled competitors sang: “There he goes, think of all the crap he knows.” I wish I could have taken part.

  My parents’ hopes that I would follow my father into medicine had long since dissolved in the face of my abysmal exam results, and Glasgow University wouldn’t look at me, to my profound relief, for I had only one thought, and that was to get into the war. The Army agreed, and presently I found myself 14687347, Private Fraser, G.M., in a draughty Nissen hut in the windswept grounds of a castle in County Durham, along with thirty other assorted conscripts, one-third of them gypsies and illiterate. We were taught to march and drill and shoot and stick bayonets into canvas dummies, all of which I knew already, having been in the military cadet force known as the Officers’ Training Corps at school. It was assumed that if you’d been to a public school you would become an officer, and while that early martial training gave me an advantage, I’m not sure that what I’d learned as a school boarder about looking after myself and my effects, to say nothing of discipline and prompt obedience, wasn’t more valuable still. At least I wasn’t as bemused as my fellows in that strange, hostile environment of screaming instructors, iron routine, and mysterious rituals which seemed to have no point but to bewilder and dismay. I’d been there before.

  But it was a strange new world just the same. When the North Country Englishman is disoriented he usually gets aggressive, and that barrack-room was no place for the faint-hearted; you could see the embryonic bullies, the keen types who welcomed the imposition of disciplined order, the patient plodders, the misfits and eccentrics, emerging in those first few weeks, and note the odd contrasts: the animal squalor and obscenity of some, the quiet acceptance of others, the hopeless terror of a few, and the bovine stolidity of the massive young farmhand in the bunk next to mine, who knelt to say his prayers every night. A few of the gypsies jeered, and one (nature imitating the art of Tom Brown’s Schooldays) threw a boot at him, and had to be revived by his associates; the farmhand wasn’t as bovine as he looked.

  Personally, I kept quiet, not acting too good nor talking too wise (thank you, Kipling), impatient to be done with a regime which had less to do with training than with what the Army called getting us “sorted out”. I resisted an attempt by the authorities to send me to the Signal Corps because I knew Morse; the infantry, and nothing but the infantry, was what I wanted, and with a real regiment. There were many irritants about primary training—being taught what I knew already; sleeping in coarse blankets (no sheets then) in my shirt, for while I had a pair of pyjamas in my kitbag, wearing them in that company would have been like passing port to the right; getting a raw neck from damp chafing serge on rainswept parade grounds; having no nocturnal toilet facilities except a large iron bucket outside the hut in the icy darkness, but worst of all, having to wear the plastic badge of the General Service Corps which somehow made me feel only half a soldier, and a pretty scruffy one at that.

  All that changed when I was posted to a young soldiers’ unit for potential officers at Derby. There we were all eager teenagers, the non-com instructors had been hand-picked, the training was far harder but considerably more advanced, standards of dress, drill, deportment and performance were immeasurably higher—and we knew that at the end of two months we would be sent to selection boards to see if we were fit for officer training. That was the Holy Grail—a commission, and being young and keen and ambitious we drilled and marched and shot and hurled ourselves over assault courses and hung on the lips of lecturers as though nothing else in life mattered—which it didn’t, then. We knew the Army was taking us seriously (and vice versa), and if ever we were in danger of forgetting it there was the awe-inspiring figure of Regimental Sergeant-Major Charlie Bradley of the Coldstream Guards to remind us. He was one of those legendary Guards RSMs, like Freddy Archer and Paddy Flynn, but even more celebrated, a tall, spare immaculate terror of a man with a piercing eye and a word of command that would have petrified Napoleon. The sight of him coming on parade, straight as a lance, pace-stick and peaked cap at the exact angle, crashing to a perfect halt, and sweeping the ranks with that dreadful glare (Gerald Kersh the novelist swore that Bradley could detect a missing trifle of equipment in a full battalion) was truly frightening; when that fearsome shriek of command struck your ear you could be in no doubt that you were in the Army now.

  I met him at close range only once, as a trembling member of a guard being inspected, and it was a revelation. I knew I was as smart as several hours of frantic scrubbing and polishing could make me, but when that cold eye was turned on me I knew real panic. Then he spoke, very softly: “Easy, lad. You’ll do,” and passed on his magisterial way. Not surprisingly, I have a high regard for RSM Charlie Bradley.

  Three things could happen to you at a selection board—you could be passed, graded NY (“not yet”), or failed outright. I was one of the quarter or so who failed, and couldn’t believe it. In a book called The General Danced at Dawn, many years later, I have described the eccentricities of selection boards, whose decisions no man could fathom, but I think I failed because during one especially fatuous test, I muttered a contemptuous complaint. Or perhaps I just wasn’t good enough. Anyway, I was posted, nursing my wounded vanity, to the ranks of the 5th Battalion of the Border Regiment, was thrice promoted lance-corporal and thrice demoted, and eventually was sent to India, and into action in Burma with the Borders’ 9th Battalion.

  Fighting the Japanese, frequently at close quarters, is an important experience. It was very primitive, old-fashioned warfare, but since I have recounted it in some detail in Quartered Safe Out Here, published nearly half a century later, I need say no more than that I learned much about soldiering and myself and about that matchless fighting man, the British infantryman, and his Indian and Gurkha comrades—yes, and the Japanese. And having led a section in action, I was not worried about going again before a selection board, which I passed this time, and found myself an officer cadet at the Officer Training School, Bangalore.

  That, in its way, was just as influential as Burma. The British Raj was going down beneath the horizon, and the old Indian Army with it (for us, if not for the Indian cadets). But we saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India—the cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door, the vast, dusty parade where the young Winston Churchill had exercised his horse, the great cadets’ dining mess with the young Briton rising at the end of the table to propose “Mr Vice, the King!” and the stalwart Sikh rising at the other end to reply: “Gentlemen, the King-Emperor!” echoed by two hundred young men from the home country and all the warrior races of the sub-continent: Maharattas, Dogras, Sikhs, Afghans, Pathans, Gurkhas, Bengalis, and some from as far as Burma, Iran, and Nigeria. It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.

  Not that I always thought so, for in memory it matches Burma and the two days’ stevedoring I once did in Port Said as the most physically gruelling experience of my life. Pampered brutes we may have seemed with bearers bringing tea and picking up our clothing where we dropped it, but we couldn’t have survived without them. The endless succession of parades, field exercises, lectures, marches, assault courses, physical training, and firing-range work, would have been impossible without their valeting; if you weren’t sweating across the plain you were being instructed in Urdu by patient munshis, or ploughing your way through tomes
on Indian military law, or learning to ride a motorbike, or swinging on ropes or climbing walls, or prowling the night playing war games, or trying to stand still on a sun-baked parade—and somehow still managing to play three sets of tennis in the midday sun and a game of football in the evening before riding in a tonga (man-drawn rickshaw) into town to a restaurant or club or cinema—unless conscience intervened and you stayed in with your law books and Urdu grammars and military manuals while the big moths fluttered round the light and the lizards played on the white walls. For the thought of failure was never far away, and the prospect of being returned ignominiously to your unit. Indeed, you never felt safe until you paraded for the last time, with your second lieutenant’s stars beneath your white cadet epaulettes, and marched off a cadet no longer but His Majesty’s trusted and well beloved friend.

  In those days you were an officer of two regiments, one British, one Indian, and could choose to serve with one or the other. The young cadets just out from England mostly opted for Indian units, on the assumption that sepoys would be easier to command than ornery British swaddies who couldn’t wait to get out of the Army. Those of us who had been in the ranks had different priorities; I’d seen enough of India, and opted for my British regiment, the Gordons, with whom my great-uncle had served on Roberts’ march to Kandahar in 1879; he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan. So out of India I went, first to Cairo, and then to Tripoli, North Africa, where the Gordons’ second battalion, the famous “Ninety-second” of Waterloo and elsewhere, were stationed in the very barracks which the US Air Force later bombed in reprisal against Colonel Gadaffi.

  Tripoli was a happy time. Highland regiments are different from others, terribly military and tradition-conscious, yet marvellously friendly and informal. Gordons’ officers were a mixture of Sandhurst regulars, some of them English, and Scots of varying degrees; the lordly drawl mingled with the broad sing-song of Aberdeenshire in complete harmony. They were a family, and far closer to their men than officers usually were, even in that democratic time. But that is a very Highland thing with its roots in clanship, and comfortable though I’d been in the Border Regiment, among the Cumbrians with whom I’d grown up, in the Gordons I felt that at last I’d come home. I’ve written one book about my time in the Borders, but three about the Gordons, recounting my adventures (fiction mingled with a great deal of fact) with my bête noire Private McAuslan, the Dirtiest Soldier in the World. I’ve been told that he had his counterparts among the military misfits of other regiments, British and American and Commonwealth, but I can hardly believe they were as slovenly, disorderly, well-meaning and accident-prone, or tried their commanders more sorely than he tried me. God bless him, wherever he is.

  Service with the Gordons was punctuated by an unpleasantly nerve-racking period in Palestine, where the state of Israel was being born in a welter of terrorist bombings, ambushes, gunfire, reprisal, and mutual mistrust, with Jew and Arab at each other’s throats and the much-maligned British holding the ring, reaping the bitter harvest of our own sowing, and wishing we were well out of it. I was on Haifa beach, stood security on the Mount of Olives on Armistice Day, and for my sins commanded the Cairo–Jerusalem night train. In a way it was worse than Burma, where at least you knew who the enemy was; it is no fun having to take your revolver into the shower, or sleep in a room whose window has to be covered with barbed wire. Everyone has his own view, of course; mine is that of a British subaltern, who wanted only to be a soldier, not a referee or a policeman.

  Yet curiously enough when I left the Army in 1947 I toyed with the idea of joining the Palestine Police (£10 a week, not bad money then) because I suspected that civilian life would be dull. Fortunately, through my father’s influence, I got a job as a trainee reporter on a weekly paper in Carlisle, and entered on the trade which cynical journalists describe as better than working and which (writing books and movies excepted) is the best job I know, or was in those days, before the rot set in—but I’ve already said my piece about that, and am well aware that I’m a fogey who will never get hot-metal newspapers out of his system, or forget the excitement of being a young reporter on the make in the typewriter age.

  I’d been in newspapers only a few months when the most important thing in my life happened. I met, fell hopelessly in love with, and proposed to a glamorous reporter on another paper, Kathleen Margarette Hetherington, who was well ahead of me in the journalistic stakes, having worked on one of the big evening papers. To my delight she said “yes”…and here we are, thank God, more than half a century later, with Simon a sheriff (judge) in Scotland; Caroline, who has somehow managed to combine being a barrister with writing nine novels and raising four of our eight grandchildren; and Nicholas, running his own company in London, staging shows and events which range from theatrical productions to installing dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum.

  The children all arrived in the 1950s, after we had come home from a year spent working as reporters on a daily paper in Canada. That had been our independent fling, but now life got serious. It was a time of heavy work, shortage of money, and great happiness, with Kathy carrying the major burden of running the home and rearing the family while I was in succession a reporter, sub-editor, foreign news editor, leader writer, features editor, and finally deputy editor of the oldest continuously-published daily newspaper in the world, the Glasgow Herald. Working on a daily means that you are something of an absentee father, out of circulation evening, night, and morning, and seeing the children at weekends, and how their wives cope is something that daily newspapermen can never quite understand. What made it worse in my case was that I spent much free time moonlighting on an evening paper, covering rugby matches, and writing bits and pieces for my own paper to boost our tight budget, but we got by; we were quite a team, Kathy and I, and our reward is that when the children get together and reminisce, they seem to be looking back on a time of laughter and happiness.

  By the mid-fifties, I had the newspaperman’s dream of writing a best-seller, and had produced one historical novel which no one would publish. Meanwhile I ploughed ahead with the bits and pieces aforesaid, earning a few extra quid a week with the wonderful bonus of hearing Kathy laughing in the next room at what I’d written—for humour paid best and came most easily to me; I knew by then I was a “light” writer or nothing.

  How the idea of Flashman came into my head I do not know. I had read Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a boy, and recognised the bullying rotter as the most interesting character in the book, and at some point in 1966 I must have asked myself (not for the first time) what could have happened to him after he was expelled from Rugby in drunken disgrace. Two things combined to make me look for the answer. One, I had just spent two weeks in Borneo and Malaya (my only “foreign” journalism) during the anti-terrorist campaign, and got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again. Two, I had just spent three months as acting editor before reverting again to deputy, and the prospect of twenty years in the job was not inviting. Kathy tells me that I said: “I’m going to write us out of this.”

  I wrote Flashman in nightly bursts after coming home from work; in all it took ninety hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table. Halfway through I broke my arm and couldn’t type, and had put the book from my mind when Kathy asked if she could read what I’d done. When she did, her reaction was to quote a line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Boy, you don’t know the riches you’re standing on!” She is the best judge I know, indeed, the only one, so I finished it, and for two years publisher after publisher in Britain and the US turned it down—one eminent agent wouldn’t even handle it—until I was ready to give up. Not Kathy; she knew it was going to succeed, so off went the battered manuscript yet again, this time to an agency who had tried valiantly with my first novel, and whose fine old Highland name appealed to me, John Farquharson. That king of literary agents, George Greenfield, tried five more houses unsuccessfully, and struck oil with the sixth, the sma
ll firm of Herbert Jenkins, publishers of Wodehouse and little other fiction. They enthused, Christopher MacLehose especially, and published Flashman just as I wrote it.

  The result was remarkable, and instructive. It wasn’t a best-seller—none of my books has been—but it got splendid reviews, the film rights were sold, and various foreign language rights, starting with Finland of all places, but what took me flat aback was the reception to the American edition. I’d written the book in the first person, as the memoir of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, admired military hero (he having concealed his perfidy and cowardice successfully for sixty years), and had appended a spoof introduction about the manuscript being discovered in a saleroom, plus footnotes. This was done for fun, not to deceive. My publishers had agreed that no one would take it for a genuine memoir for a moment, and indeed, no British reviewer did (although one seemed to be hedging his bets), but in the States one-third of about fifty reviews hailed it as the real thing. Since some of the reviewers were academics, this was alarming; one even described it as the most important literary discovery since the Boswell Papers. The New York Times rather mischievously rounded up all the reviews which had taken it as genuine, and I reflected that there were some universities from whom I could never expect an honorary degree.

  I cannot be a hypocrite and say that I wasn’t amused, but I do sympathise genuinely with those who were deceived. I’m as gullible as the next man, and there are works of whose authenticity I have honest doubts—Louis Le Golif ’s Memoirs of a Buccaneer, for example, and a script I was once shown of an allegedly true memoir of a nineteenth-century slave-trader. It depends on the mood in which you approach a book, how it strikes you at first glance, and whether you want to believe it. Readers still ask me whether Flashman was real or not, plainly hoping that he was. Others, alas, are in no doubt, like the students who occasionally write to request a sight of the original manuscript, and wonder why he is missing from the Dictionary of National Biography.