Basil Street Blues (27 page)

Something similar was to happen at the end of my ten weeks’ basic training. The Ministry of Defence suddenly noticed that my mother was Swedish, and decided that this called for an investigation. So while everyone else went on to their next posting I was held in limbo at Winchester with one other national serviceman (who was suspected of having tuberculosis). The barracks were suddenly empty and for two or three weeks there was positively nothing for us to do. We went once or twice to films, stared pennilessly at girls in the street, lay in the sun on St Catherine’s Hill overlooking the town. We even managed to commandeer a Land Rover and, with my new friend at the wheel, patrolled the summer countryside. These days, being timeless, have remained with me. But suddenly one day I was ordered to proceed
soonest
to Chester. I never discovered whether my friend had TB.

I was to spend sixteen weeks under the improbable shadow of the Officer Cadet School near Chester. Eaton Hall was a ‘Wagnerian palace’, as Nikolaus Pevsner described it, with intricate Gothic pinnacles and grandiose battlements, that had once belonged to the Dukes of Westminster. The lodges, chapels and stables, the lakes and neglected rose gardens descending to the River Dee, had been dramatically transformed to cater for the peacetime goings-on of our amateur infantry with its bustling captains and bristling sergeants. Jeremy Isaacs, who was there at the same time as myself, recalls that one of our sergeant-majors was called Blood and another Leach; and that the Regimental Sergeant-Major was Lynch. ‘Much gallows humour resulted.’

Eaton Hall was the sort of fantastical place where my late Great-Uncle Pat, the innocent Major of the Militia, might have enjoyed performing manoeuvres and parades. But I did not enjoy the platoon marches and marathons, the kit inspections and fatigues. ‘Training consisted of drill with spit and polish,’ Jeremy Isaacs writes, ‘firmly, but not ferociously insisted on; giving lecturettes; planning and leading field exercises.’ Jeremy himself made a brilliant night attack on a group of boulders that he believed were the enemy. I landed in a swamp, sinking with my bren gun up to my shoulders. On Sundays we headed for the comforts of Blossom’s Hotel in Chester to forget our humiliations of the week.

Because of my deferment as an articled clerk I was older than most of my fellow officer cadets. Griffy Philipps and even Christopher Capron and John Mein from my Scaitcliffe days whom I might have seen again, had all finished their National Service. I found some boys who had been junior to me at Eton were now my seniors at Eaton Hall. My smiles of recognition often went unanswered. I had become an anachronism. But I did not fall seriously out-of-step until I finished my officer training, was given the rank of Second Lieutenant, and had the good luck to miss active service.

It must seem odd that I became an officer. At the War Office Selection Board near Andover I had not performed well. I used the wrong method of getting a log over a stream and, using arguments of unassailable ingenuity, reached an incorrect conclusion in the written examination. But I had achieved all this error and misjudgement with the aid of proper grammar and the right accent. So, between ends and means, I was an awkward case. Everything depended on my lecture. I spoke on ‘Sense of Humour’ without a single joke. It was an intimidating performance (extensively cribbed from George Meredith’s lecture ‘On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’, and also from Harold Nicolson’s little book
The English Sense of Humour
): and it worked. For what I was really being tested on was not, fortunately, my military skills, but my acting abilities. Could I convince other ranks that there was no danger in the trenches, that we personally hated the enemy, that our cause was glorious and everyone else’s vile? On the strength of my ‘Sense of Humour’, the War Office Selection Board decided that I could. But I had not passed with distinction and was to be transferred from the Greenjackets to the Royal Fusiliers, at the request of the Greenjackets.

Before I joined my new regiment I was granted three weeks’ leave. It was the autumn of 1956. I remember going to John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
at the Royal Court Theatre and watching many of the red-faced audience leave in the interval. I also went to Ingmar Bergman’s sombre film
The Seventh Seal
, and during the Pathé News was surprised to see several of my colleagues from Eaton Hall gesticulating blindly from the screen. Their trapped expressions, like zoo-animals’, stared vacantly down at me, while the commentator described the embarkation of the Royal Fusiliers to Egypt. National servicemen, as well as the regular army, were being ‘given the privilege of serving their sovereign’ by recapturing the Suez Canal from Colonel Nasser.

There spread through me a sense that something was wrong. Surely I should have been up there on the screen instead of in the stalls? That evening I telephoned Griffy Philipps and tried to make a joke of it. ‘Will they shoot me?’ I laughed. He considered the question far too long. ‘I should think, Hagga, that they would grant you a court martial,’ he replied, ‘first.’ Fifteen years later I wrote an account of what happened for B.S. Johnson’s National Service anthology
All Bull
.

Next day I telephoned my adjutant ostensibly on a small matter connected with dress… Cutting across a detailed query on buttons, he demanded to know ‘where the hell’ I was. Did I realise I had missed the war? I was to put myself under close arrest and escort myself to the Tower of London…

I arrived at the Tower of London later that morning and, standing to attention, was cross-examined by two senior officers. Why, they asked, had I not responded to the urgent telegram summoning me to active service?

I spent the night in ‘Napoleon’s Room’ at the Tower. The following day, unexpectedly, came a reprieve… It appeared that the adjutant, in the heat of war, had addressed the telegram to himself. In the circumstances there was little they could do, except have me up on the minor charge of being improperly dressed.

‘You are wearing the wrong buttons, Mr Holroyd. Kindly take a week’s Orderly Officer.’

However I was not yet out of trouble. The
News Chronicle
that week reported that the Union Jack on the Tower of London was flying upside down. This was certainly news to me since I did not know that the Union Jack possessed an upside down. Yet as Orderly Officer, I was responsible. I think they were happy at the Tower to see me leave at the end of that week. I can still hear the voice of one major who had the job of deciding what to do with me. ‘Take a walk, Mr Holroyd,’ was his solution. The tone of the sergeant who presented himself in my bedroom one night after I had failed to turn out the guard was more alarming. Snapping on the light, he took three paces forward, came to a crashing halt and after sharply saluting me as I lay in bed, shouted out: ‘Permission to speak, sir?’

I had been posted to Connaught Barracks on the heights of Dover cliffs which the Royal Fusiliers had left when setting off for the Suez Canal, and which was now filled with refugees from the abortive Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. After my recent misadventures, I was morbidly anxious to get things right. But it was not easy. For example, I had been told on the Saturday night to report on Monday morning in Dover wearing ‘mufti’. This featured a bowler hat. I did not have a bowler hat. In desperation I called at Norhurst on the Sunday and retrieved from the garage a very old bowler which my Aunt Yolande had once sported. ‘Crowned with this, like a small black pimple at the top of my head, I descended properly dressed upon Dover,’ I wrote in my essay for B.S. Johnson.

My instruction had been to make the refugees ‘feel at home’ on the cliffs. This was not only vague, I discovered, but a euphemism. For my job actually consisted of juggling with inadequate supplies of light bulbs and contraceptives so as to ensure that those Hungarians occupying unlit barrack rooms were protected with French letters, while those left unprotected were bathed, like battery hens, in a permanent glare. The supplies were to be alternated each night. After a few weeks the Hungarians went forth and multiplied.

So ended my first year in the army.

During my second year I perfected the art of being overlooked. Previously I had unwittingly drawn attention to myself by being in various ways out-of-step. Now I used my wits to camouflage myself. At first I had been nonplussed by military terminology – the practice, for example, of indicating a tree by calling it a ‘bushy-topped object at four o’clock’, which seemed to me a complicated method of attaining soldierly simplicity. I was bemused, too, by the exaggerated way of walking called marching, by the barking out of curious sounds called orders, by the loss of privacy in the general hubbub and frenzy. I decided not to try and analyse all this commotion but to copy, even caricature it. I watched what the others did and then did it myself, starting a fraction late perhaps but doing it slightly quicker. I positioned myself in the middle rank, towards the middle, and was gratified to see that people were finding it increasingly difficult to pick me out. I always answered with a shout to a number, not a name. I was losing my identity, fading from notice, and feeling all the better for it. When alone, I equipped myself with a board to which I attached some sheets of paper. Carrying this, and a short swagger stick, I hurried round Connaught Barracks after the regiment had returned from Suez, looking urgently at my watch and studying the blank sheets of paper with an expression of severity. It was obvious I was up to something pretty important. I would strut, ostensibly from one significant place to another, though actually from my bedroom back to my bedroom, occasionally calling out the words ‘Carry on!’ to groups of soldiers slightly beyond earshot. One day, while I was standing alone in the Officers’ Mess, someone opened the door, looked round the room where I was standing, and shouted out to some people behind him ‘No one here!’ And I knew I had achieved my ambition of becoming invisible.

In the army I trained hard as a non-volunteer, shooting up my hand barely too late for everything except the job of Orderly Officer during Christmas and other regimental holidays when the barracks would empty and there was again positively nothing to do. The guard had to be inspected of course, but these were the years of IRA quietude, and there wasn’t anything to guard against. All was quiet. The adjutant at Connaught Barracks was a man in his thirties called Dick Jones. He was something of an intellectual but, in the manner of T.E. Lawrence, wanted to change himself into a man of action – and was to die tragically young, climbing a mountain in Wales. He lent me his collection of gramophone records and, while the regiment went on leave and I was alone, the Officers’ Mess on top of Dover cliffs was filled with the sound of Sibelius and Nielsen symphonies – to which I later added the Swedish composer Franz Berwald to make up my Scandinavian trio. These musical intervals are what I remember most at Dover.

The problem I gave the army was not so different from the one I had presented my grandparents. What were they to do with me? I found myself appointed Motor Transport Officer despite being unable to drive and could, I believe, have awarded myself a driving licence instead of waiting till my mid-thirties. I also became ‘Mess Officer’, a phrase that quite accurately describes my catering skills (the Royal Fusilier curries were indistinguishable from the innocent fruit salads that usually followed them). Also, for a season on Salisbury Plain, I was appointed ADC to our Brigade Commander, the formidable-looking Brigadier Bernard Fergusson (who had himself been ADC to the legendary General Wavell and written a biography of him).

Despite his ferocious appearance – a flashing monocle and rampant yellow moustache – Bernard Fergusson was a civilised, literate man. Discovering that I was a reader of books and dreamed one day of being some sort of writer, he engaged me in conversation about James Elroy Flecker and Siegfried Sassoon, and then invited some writers he knew – Peter Fleming the travel writer, and the novelist L.P. Hartley – to dinner so that I could meet them. I was very nervous on these occasions and once poured the Brigadier a sherry and soda instead of his whisky. But L.P. Hartley gallantly rushed to my rescue, claiming that he had distinctly heard Fergusson demand sherry and soda. I read his novels with additional admiration over the following weeks.

When Peter Fleming came to dinner, Fergusson invited me to bring along my friend Anthony Howard who became spectacularly drunk by the end of the evening. On leaving the house, he accidentally put on the Brigadier’s hat instead of his own. Spotting his sudden promotion when we got back to camp, we then spent the rest of the night employing all the military tactics we had been taught (short of bayonet drill) smuggling the Brigadier’s hat back and retrieving his own. Anthony Howard was the only other national serviceman in the battalion addicted to the reading of books, and his company and conversation were a great support to me. There was between us an unintentional rivalry as to who was more ill-adapted to this peculiar way of life – a contest, I believe, usually settled in my favour.

It was my job to get Bernard Fergusson to the place of military action each day on Salisbury Plain. But such were my map-reading skills that we never witnessed a single hostility. Fergusson was marvellously patient, but sometimes his exasperation broke through and once, approaching midnight, miles from where we should have been and still no warfare in sight, he insisted that I come to a halt and give him some salutes.

The last months of my army career were unorthodox. While the Royal Fusiliers retreated to Sutton Coldfield, I was dispatched to a department of the War Office in Colindale, on the northern perimeter of London. Here, with one other national serviceman called Smout, I tackled the vital task of redundancy. These were early days in the amalgamation of regiments and the rundown of the army – ‘streamlining’ it was bravely called. National Service itself was soon to end. Smout and I divided the country in half and went through the applications from all field officers. Some had applied to continue their military careers, others wanted to accept the money that was on offer for early retirement and enter the priesthood, run a toy shop in Slough, start an egg farm in the Hebrides. We would read through these applications and, knowing what percentage of these officers would have to go, make our recommendations. One of the names that came before me was that of the Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Fusiliers. He was not a popular man, partly because he owned a brightly-coloured cat called Cooper which, many officers thought, made the regiment look ridiculous on parade. At night the Colonel would emerge from the Officers’ Mess and call: ‘Coopah! Coopah!’ And various subalterns concealed in the bushes would miaow back. Our Colonel was one of the officers who left the army and I later heard he had got a job as television critic on a new fascist weekly.