Scruffy - A Diversion (5 page)

A wisp of his education floated through his stream of consciousness, a recollection that it all had something to do with the thumb; man had been made from monkey by the mobility of his thumb. Tim had looked at his own broad, stubby, capable ones and shuddered slightly.

He had seen many of the apes before, scampering and mischiefing about the town, but had never paid any close attention to them. Now everything was different; he was O.I.C., Officer in Charge of Apes, and whether the position was nonsensical or useless, the fact was it existed. It was a regimental tradition, it had continuity, and inescapably as of that moment he was it. Now for the first time he was looking into and behind the eyes of one of these creatures and was feeling himself extraordinarily moved by what he saw there.

What had it been? Disappointment—loneliness—regret—old, old echoes of a past that one could not remember or wholly grasp, but which left one sad and dispirited as when the residue of an unhappy dream remains with one long after waking? Or was it a compendium of all of these?

Tim had looked into the misery that seemed to lie behind the golden-brown eyes of this monkey and suddenly found himself tormented by a whole host of questions that formulated themselves in his mind. “
You just missed it, didn’t you? Yet you almost made it! Why? Was it your fault? Was it anyone’s fault? Or anyone’s design? Who decreed that you should be monkey and I should be man? You were so very close to it at one time, weren’t you? And then something happened and now you can’t think or reason, or remember or look forward. You sit and scratch and pick bits of dried skin, and eat and fight and eliminate and procreate, and that’s the sum of it. You look like us. You can even get up and walk like us, and that’s as far as it goes.”

Was this, Tim had wondered, the original Adam ejected from the Garden of Eden and now gazing longingly out of those unhappy eyes at the riches and treasures within that garden for ever denied them?

As a boy, dogs, cats, birds, mice, had been casual pets, but this was something different again, this silent, unhappy creature who with its fellows had been entrusted to his care. Upon that care would depend whether they would go hungry or fed, be wet or dry when the rains came or the Levanter shrouded the Rock, be healed in sickness or left to suffer, survive or die.

The Brigadier had sloughed off a job he obviously considered futile and absurd, but in this moment Tim knew that it devolved upon him as to whether these victims of Nature were comfortable or not. And in that same instant he had inwardly voiced the determination that, by God, since the Brigadier had seen fit to nominate him Officer in Charge of Apes, he was going to be just that.

The Timothy Bailey who had descended from the heights and returned thoughtfully to his office that first day was not the same one who an hour or so before had ascended the side of the Rock to the village of the apes.

Becoming an expert on the subject of Macaques, however, proved to be more difficult than Tim had anticipated. To begin with, in accordance with the geographical distribution of monkeys, they had no business being where they were. Apes (the Macaques were really not apes at all, but a tail-less species of the dog monkey, Tim learned) were simply not indigenous to Europe. Histories of the Gibraltar apes there were none, and such theories as had been propounded by the oldest inhabitants, whom Tim consulted, were pretty far-fetched.

One of them was that at one time Africa and Europe were joined, making the Mediterranean an inland lake, and the apes were descendants of those who crossed over from Africa at the time. But this made no sense to Tim’s logical mind, since in that case the monkeys would have spread throughout all the coastal regions of Southern Spain where climate and flora were no different than at Gibraltar.

Another was that some kind of tunnel existed under the Straits between Africa and the European mainland, terminating in St. Michael’s Caves, the entrance to whose impressive underground cathedrals was half-way up the side of the Rock. Tim found this to be poppycock.

Most sensible of the presumptions was that during the Moorish occupation of the promontory then known as Jebel Tarik the beasts had been brought over in dhows by Moorish Traders. The animals found the place to their liking, and began to breed.

Books on monkeys by famous zoologists and anthropologists for which Tim sent away to London proved equally unenlightening. There appeared to be endless chapters entitled “Menstrual Cycle and Behaviour”, and “Sexual Periodicity”, which depressed him beyond words, and shed no light whatsoever upon his immediate problems. Professors wrote books on the mentality and sociological organization of apes, or their aptitude for learning how to get at bits of food hung or buried beyond their reach, but none of them had got around to explaining how a monkey felt about things, which was what had concerned Tim from the beginning, and even more so now with Scruffy, the Problem Child, on his hands.

From the regimental point of view, the Royal Artillery’s concern over apes was buried in dry archives and was not fruitful, but in the course of his investigation Tim ran across one bit of archaic gossip which somehow seemed to link the apes with the presence of the British and their regiments. This was to the effect that if and when the apes ever died out completely, or left the Rock, the British would be driven from Gibraltar.

Since this cheerful little curse was not exactly friendly, it was no great feat of deduction for Tim to conclude that it must have been devised originally by Britain’s enemies.

To maintain foothold on this extraordinary piece of real estate, the British had fought the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch. Which of these nations had fostered this happy slogan was not clear, but what interested Tim was the extent to which it had persisted in modern times, and even to this day on the Rock. He thought that in all probability it had been kept alive by the Spaniards, who for all of their politeness and seeming friendliness had never forgiven the British for pre-empting a piece of their territory to sit athwart the Mediterranean.

Tim wondered whether this was why the responsibility for the apes had been handed over to a regiment quartered there and the Government actually provided an allowance for their maintenance. The apes not only appeared to be backed by tradition but seemed to be looked upon as mascots to an alien race occupying an alien territory. Tim was charmed to find the British Government involved in this kind of superstition.

In the end his real foundation of ape lore, knowledge and eventually experience, Tim acquired from Gunner Lovejoy.

Still smarting from the strips that had been torn off him by the Brigadier, Tim’s thoughts now turned to the Gunner and the strange partnership he had formed with him. The first meeting which had taken place in Tim’s office had been what one might have expected and had yielded little.

The Gunner, with that inevitable suspicion and cunning with which a ranker encounters his new officer for the first time, was wary and close-mouthed, restricting himself to “Yes, sir. No, sir” and “Very good, sir.” In the main it had been obvious to Tim that Lovejoy had been trying to make out what his predecessor, Major Patterson, had told him. Furthermore, he had been anxiously estimating how much Tim intended to interfere with his way of life. The interview had ended with the Gunner apparently satisfied saying, “Just you leave everything to me, sir,” and taking his dismissal with alacrity.

Strange, Tim thought, how much, how very much more he now knew about Gunner Lovejoy.

Physically Gunner Lovejoy of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery was small, just a half an inch over minimum requirements for height. He had the agility acquired from years of nipping round corners or popping into doorways to avoid meetings with sergeants or officers, who invariably had work for him to do. He was fortyish with a mop of ginger-coloured hair which was usually down over his eyes or sticking out in untidy wisps from his Gunner’s field-service cap. His face was seamed and leathery and small, with a button nose, and perhaps it was the slightly flaring nostrils which led Scruffy to the belief that John Lovejoy was really one of them. Lightish-coloured blue eyes were deep-set in the weathered countenance, eyes that could mirror innocence, when innocence was wanted, but mostly reflected that cunning resulting from years of skrimshanking in the Army, ducking responsibility and anything which looked like hard work or interference with the pleasures of private life.

Actually as a regular in charge of apes, a post he had filled with distinction for twenty years, Gunner Lovejoy from time to time worked far harder and longer and weirder hours than any of his colleagues in Anti-Aircraft Battery 5.

But the point was that they were hours of his own choosing and in a field where he was the unquestioned specialist. In his denims and khaki jacket he was the most unsoldierly specimen on the Rock, and when compelled to appear in regulation uniform not much better, since he contrived somehow to make it look ill-fitting and too large for him. It had been twenty years since Gunner Lovejoy had fired a round from a field-piece, or so much as laid a hand clutching a polishing cloth to muzzle or breechblock of anti-aircraft guns. Instead he had made himself indispensable to a series of O.I.C. Apes, and had remained through practically three generations of apes, feeding, guarding and nannying them.

He was attendant at births, marriages and deaths; he rooted them out from under culverts or plucked them out of trees; he guarded the infant apelets from jealous members of the pack; he broke up savage and vicious battles, often too late to avoid a fatality; he nursed them in illness and when necessary gave them what-for in health. He knew every quirk of their mischievous little minds and every trick of which they were capable.

Tim understood that the Gunner’s anthropomorphic attitude towards his charges was quite natural. He saw in them a kind of third-class and wholly underprivileged people, since Lovejoy’s opinion of the human race was very low. Reflecting upon this, the thought struck Tim that there was no reason why this anthropomorphism should be a one-way street, and it was quite possible that Scruffy and the rest of the pack regarded their keeper as only another and larger species of tail-less monkey.

However, the facts were that if there was anything in the world the Gunner loved, it was his apes; he was devoted to them and in particular to the bad boy of the pack, the intransigent and practically uncontrollable Scruffy. Something of Scruffy, Tim felt, was present in Gunner Lovejoy. He, too, was in constant rebellion against life as he had found it, or as it had been inexorably welded about him. And the reason he probably loved and admired Scruffy so greatly was that the monkey got away with it all.

From the time of the sheer accident by which the Gunner as a boy of twenty had been commanded to feed and take on the responsibility of the two packs of apes resident on the Rock, known as the Middle Hill and the Queen’s Gate packs, Lovejoy had seen at once his opportunity for avoiding all the onerous duties connected with servicing His Majesty’s hardware, as well as indulging in his preference for animals over the human species. As a result, whenever the question of his transfer to other climes had come up in accordance with army bureaucracy and custom, the screams of the resident O.I.C. Apes who leaned upon him had always served to postpone such transfer.

Tim remembered that after his first meeting with the Gunner there had followed a period of cautious eyeing of and sparring with one another, during which time Lovejoy, as he became aware of Tim’s interest in the apes, gradually warmed to him. But it was when he discovered in Tim the growing affection approaching his own for the intractable Scruffy, that the Gunner had relaxed, let down his hair and become Tim’s staunch friend and ally.

And it was during this period that Tim discovered that Lovejoy, far from being the racketeer he had suspected who would pocket the Government’s food allowance for his charges or steal and sell their rations, frequently spent his own pence in monkey-nuts and fruits for his own favourites. To further their feeding and well-being he stole rapaciously from both the Sergeants’ and Officers’ Messes. He pinched medical supplies from the infirmary and straw, hay and an occasional blanket from Stores, all this to his direct and simple mind being less complicated than going through channels. He was in fact, Tim concluded, a kind of Robin Hood who stole from the people to give to the monkeys.

Eventually Tim was to establish the Gunner as the most sensitive, sympathetic and logical of all the bolsheviks. Lovejoy went one step farther in his concept of carrying on the class warfare and started with the apes entrusted to his care.

This cleared up the mystery of small peculations which had encumbered Tim’s records, accounts and supplies, but also opened his eyes to the needs of the apes. It did not matter that Tim’s was the Tory and feudal approach, the aims of himself and Gunner Lovejoy were identical, and the alliance was formed.

With it Tim cheerfully took on all of the Gunner’s liabilities—his disinterest in matters military, his slovenliness and partiality to strong beers. None of this mattered in the face of the Gunner’s genuine devotion to these beasts. This was what counted with Tim.

As for Lovejoy, it was all just too good to be true. He had found not only a kindred soul who understood him but also a powerful patron to stand as a buffer between himself and the Powers when his failings had brewed up a mess of trouble. Twenty-four hours after the
Entente Cordiale
had been closed between them, the Captain had secured the Gunner his Lance-Bombardier’s stripes. The further fact that the Gunner had lost them twenty-four hours afterwards, owing to the magnitude of the celebration he had staged, was beside the point. No one could expect miracles.

Part of the treaty read that the Gunner should give up his pilfering even in a good cause, while Captain Bailey would inaugurate a campaign to acquire all that was necessary for the comfort, if not a bit of luxury, of the apes by means of appeals to the authorities through proper channels. That these might fail, and that eventually both of them would return to the logic and efficiency of the Sherwood Forest method they could not foresee. But thus began the unprecedented bombardment of the Government of the United Kingdom with correspondence from the O.I.C. Apes, Gibraltar.