Chapter XV

Roy Emberson was on the draft at Halifax, and proved to be a man after my own heart. I lost no time in getting to know him. He was about twenty-three or twenty-four. His appearance was in his favour: he was a likely-looking, handsome young man, with light-brown hair, brown eyes and a fresh complexion. The thing which struck me almost at once was his air of relaxed, unassuming self-confidence. In those war-time days, almost all young officers (and older ones) were living in unaccustomed circumstances and conditions, among people with whom they wouldn’t have had much to do in peace-time. This insecurity often led many (including myself) into assuming one sort of air or another for the benefit of strangers - the tough man of few words, the man who seeks advantage by excessive courtesy, the detached man whose real thoughts are elsewhere, and so on. There was nothing at all like this about Emberson. He struck you as being quietly self-possessed and entirely himself. He didn’t put on any sort of act - you felt - because he didn’t need to. At the same time he wasn’t detached. He was shrewd and alert. He seemed poised and in accord with his surroundings. He was secured as much by his limitations as his qualities. Nostalgia and sensitivity couldn’t find a toehold anywhere in him. Privately, in my own mind, I nicknamed him ‘Harlequin’: but just at the moment he was a Harlequin without a Columbine - though on the lookout, of course. Without being loquacious or self-assertive, he was debonair in manner, an adventurer, as it were, by temperament rather than by resolve. He seemed cheerful and carefree; an amusing, refreshing person to be with. During the months we spent together I never once heard him raise his voice. His favourite word of approval was ‘genuine’: ‘a genuine sort of bloke’. He was certainly that himself.

After a day or two of each other’s company at the depot, Roy and I found that a natural third had become added to us. This was, as Roy put it, ‘a long slab of an Irishman’ called Paddy Gibbons. Tall he was, and a little older than either of us, with a noticeable touch of the brogue and a gently teasing way with him. I began to feel that the trip to the Middle East was going to be better fun than I had expected.

Round about this time the whole draft, of whom there were about thirty or so, received a briefing from some major who was technically in charge of us. The only thing he said which mattered — or that I remember - was that on board ship we would be four to a cabin. He said that those of us who had already formed groups of two or three should foregather on one side of the room, while the rest, who hadn’t, should stay where they were. The already formed groups were then to ‘pick up’ their complement from among the rest, just as teams are picked up at school. (‘We’ll have Smith.’ ‘We’ll have Jones’ etc.)

Now it so happened that the Adams-Emberson-Gibbons group seemed a shade unlucky in the choosing order. We were the penultimate group, and when it came to our turn there were only two people left. One was a gloomy, unlikeable man called Cairncross (that is not his name) whom nobody cared for. The other was a mere child of a subaltern, patently immature and shy, who had not summoned the savoir-faire to make any friends or to ‘put himself across’ at all. The wretched two stood and waited while we conferred in a corner.

‘Take the boy,’ said Paddy. ‘’Got to be better than Cairncross.’

After some hesitation, Roy and I agreed. We said we’d have the boy, who seemed glad not to be left the absolute last. I felt sorry for Cairncross - I who was no stranger to humiliation - but he had rather brought it on himself.

Our ‘boy’ turned out to be called Giles. He was known, he said, to his friends as ‘Piggy’ (but gave no reason for this). Piggy Giles proved an excellent fellow, honest, kind-hearted, good-natured and obliging. I think we all felt the better - more secure and more equal to the unforeseeable hazards of our impending journey - on account of the four-square team we’d now formed. I can’t remember that during the ensuing months we ever had a serious disagreement among ourselves; but we pulled each other out of several holes, and avoided a few more because it became known that we were mutually supportive. I remember how one night a burly, aggressive fellow called Murphy got drunk and began trying to pick a quarrel with me. He became discouraged, however, when it was made plain to him that there were four of us.

I wouldn’t mind having those months over again; not only for our travelling adventures, but simply for the enjoyment of the comradeship of ‘the gang of four’. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it since, for it was in its nature a product of the strange journey we were on, with all its new experiences and unforeseeable encounters.

We sailed from the Clyde. Our ship was called the Nea Hellas. She was a Greek passenger ship which had been at sea when Italy fell upon Greece, and had at once sailed to put herself at the disposal of the Allies. She formed part of a big convoy, escorted by destroyers. Our voyage took place at the height of the German U-boat campaign - the Battle of the Atlantic. It was quite on the cards that one or other of the convoy ships might be torpedoed, but in the event none was. We weren’t apprehensive; we felt confidence in those distant, greyhound-like destroyers we could watch from the deck, speeding around us and signalling to one another.

The food was excellent. Furthermore, this was before the days when all troopships went ‘dry’. There was a considerable amount of drinking aboard the ship - among the officers, that is. A lot of people were overspending their pay, and I recall a poker school, consisting mostly of R. A.M.C. officers - doctors, in fact - in which disconcertingly large sums changed hands. There were no women on board; not even a nurse.

We sailed far out into the Atlantic; almost to within sight of America, a steward told me. This was to elude the U-boats. Then we returned eastwards and so came at length into tropical waters and to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where we remained for a few days. It was swelteringly hot, and humid as a Turkish bath. No one was allowed ashore. The garish little town was half-concealed by rolling clouds of vapour, and above it hung the mountainous forests, matted, shaggy green - greener than anything I had ever seen - like a shapeless giant sprawling prone, head hung down over the minuscule men and their tiny boats dotting the harbour. The still, green jungle looked vast, dwarfing everything else, rendering humanity itself futile. It must have looked no different to the first Portuguese navigators. I was glad when we left and sailed south for Cape Town.

At Cape Town, we knew, we were going to disembark and in due course board another ship to sail up to Suez. There would be shore leave while we were waiting. The prospect was exciting. The ship’s stewards spoke highly of Cape Town: it was a great place to have a good time, and September was the best of all months to be there. We received plenty of gratuitous advice about shops, restaurants, clubs, etc. I have always remembered Roy Emberson’s reply to this. ‘Just give me Cape Town,’ he said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

One morning very early, I was surprised - and rather annoyed — to be woken in my bunk by Roy. His sang-froid habituel seemed for the moment to have left him. He was urgent and animated. ‘Come up on deck, Dicky. Now! You’ve got to see it!’

It was easier to do as he said. We all went up on deck. The ship was lying in Table Bay. Some way off was Cape Town itself, dusky in twilight. Beyond and above rose the long, level line of Table Mountain, dominating everything below. Behind it and up to the zenith, the whole sky was aflame. The cirrus clouds looked like great crimson brush-strokes, flake upon burning flake. We were arched over by this luminescent, glowing vault. The steep face of the mountain, still in shadow, and the fiery sky formed a setting for the smokeless, motionless city itself, its buildings slowly revealed as white - white upon white - bigger and smaller blocks of white, as the light grew and fell upon them, first the shoreward and gradually those on the farther slope. Upstanding to the right was Lion Rock, itself a smouldering red.

This was our first sight of the famous city where none of us had ever been before; the city which, in prospect and our imagination, promised every sensuous pleasure attainable by young men. The four of us stood together, breathing the scented air wafted from the shore. Hibiscus? Frangipani? Gardenia? Bougainvillea? I didn’t know then which were scented and which weren’t, and didn’t care, in that silent resplendence. I thought, This was what it meant! We had been led to expect something exciting and beautiful, but nothing approaching this.

That morning, as we lay to in the bay, I composed a lyric for the occasion - one purposely devised in Embersonian idiom.

Roy Emberson’s Song about the Cape

Heads down, forwards!

Sweet and low!

The white town shining like a fall of snow.

All the land of evergreen,

Royal with sunlight, rich, serene;

Everything you’ve never seen.

Now the shore leave’s through, and so

Where’s the girls?

What do you know?

Rock it out, boys, let it go.

Tonight the war is gilt and gloss,

Crimson flowers and Southern Cross.

On the Mountain, cloud-mist swirls:

Harbour-lights a nest of pearls:

All the drink and all the girls.

Come on, lads, let’s see you move!

Don’t it grip ya, ain’t it smooth

On the batter, in the groove?

When the Stukas rock the floor,

Boy! You’ll wish you’d drunk some more.

When the grade gets really tough,

Think your lust was slight enough.

Get stuck in and grab the stuff!

Soft, sweet Cape and all that’s there,

Flame hibiscus, golden air,

Country for a millionaire!

And tomorrow’s grey and rough.

Later that day we went ashore, equipped with passes which were valid until two a.m.

It was that very evening, in Cape Town, that I made, by pure luck, one of the enduring and truly rewarding friendships of my life. It came about like this. At that time, with troopship convoys bound for the Middle East not infrequently putting in at Cape Town, the native British (in contradistinction to the Boers) were all keen to show hospitality and warmth to Allied soldiers. A considerable crowd of people were waiting actually on the harbourside to welcome the soldiers as they came ashore and invite individuals to their homes. As officers we, of course, hung back from this amicable melee; but we were soon told of other arrangements which had been made for us: namely, the Convoy Dance.

At that period of the war — when the Middle East Force (though we didn’t know it, of course) was being heavily reinforced and built up for the El Alamein offensive — whenever a convoy stopped at Cape Town, all officers were ipso facto invited to what became known as the Convoy Dance at a big country club called the Kelvin Grove. Kelvin Grove is - or was at that time - a beautiful place, with a dining-room, a ballroom, bars, a swimming-pool, extensive gardens - the lot. In my memory it remains - for I went there only once - rather like the wonderful place where Le Grand Meaulnes found himself at the magic party. All that needs to be said is that all four of us found ourselves having the time of our lives. Roy Emberson remained, as usual, of self-assured and quiet demeanour, but I reckon even he was pleasantly startled. The girls were as delightful as the gardenias and the moonlight. There can be few places as beautiful as South Africa in September.

It was getting on for late in the evening when I, strolling happily along a corridor near the ballroom, came upon a pretty, dark-haired girl in her mid-twenties. I passed the time of night.

‘Have you seen the Secretary anywhere?’ she asked me.

‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.’

‘Well,’ she said (she had a very pleasant, rather firm contralto voice which suited her well), ‘it’s like this. Earlier this evening, I gave a bottle of gin I’ve got to the Secretary and asked him to look after it for me, and he locked it up in the safe in his office. If I could only find him, I could get it out.’

I should explain that in those war-time days, if you were lucky enough to get the chance to buy a bottle of gin, whisky, etc., you latched on to it tight and made damned sure nobody snitched it. There wasn’t much more, you see.

I gladly joined the girl in her search. Her name was Muriel. (It wasn’t, actually.) Her family lived in Cape Town: that is to say, her mother did; her father was dead, but she had two elder brothers. As we went on conversing, it became clear to me that this was a cultured, educated lady; a bit different from Roy Emberson fodder. I took off my Harlequin mask, dropped my Harlequin persona, told her my name was Richard (not Dicky) and steered the conversation on to T. S. Eliot. We got on well.

‘And what’s more,’ said Muriel, ‘my brother’s a real poet. His poetry’s published by Faber.’

This was a time - the ’thirties had, indeed, been a decade - when Faber and Faber were the avant-garde publishers of the widely read and successful poets of the day: Eliot, Ezra Pound, Auden, Spender, Isherwood (not a poet), MacNeice and others. In those days contemporary poets were more widely read than they are now, and their names were names to conjure with.

‘Who is he?’ I asked, wide-eyed.

‘George Shaw,’ replied Muriel.

This gave me a considerable jolt. I knew the name of G. D. Shaw (which I’ve been asked to alter) well enough, for it appeared among the Faber poets whose books were listed on the backs of the dust-jackets of the poetry of Eliot, Auden and the rest; however, I hadn’t as yet read any G. D. Shaw, for my funds at Oxford had been a bit limited for buying books, though I was up-to-date in possession of Eliot, Auden (Look, Stranger and Another Time) and MacNeice ( Plant and Phantom), And here was G. D. Shaw’s sister, talking to me and looking for a bottle of gin. I was only twenty-two and had never met any of the recognized modern poets, but was myself full of aspirations; and furthermore, had been starved of any real intellectual company for more than two years past.

Muriel Shaw has remained one of my dearest friends. We were never lovers and never looked to be: but how much wisdom, understanding, support, discriminating advice, sensible criticism and warm encouragement I have received from Muriel during the past nearly fifty years I cannot begin to measure.

We duly found the Secretary and the gin, tracked down Roy and the others with the girls they had met, and went on to a night-club. When we parted, Muriel left me her address and telephone number; the other girls did the same and dispersed to their homes. (This was long before the days when even a Roy Emberson could expect to sleep with a girl the first night he met her.) It was now after two a.m. - no good going back to the ship - and the four of us began to look around for somewhere to sleep.

We came to a hotel and went in. But we had fallen into a common error of strangers in Cape Town - that of assuming that everyone was friendly. This particular hotel turned out to be very Boer. Only the night porter was around, and he was hostile and unhelpful. No rooms, no nothing. This annoyed Roy, who finally said he was going to sleep there anyway, and laid himself down on a sofa in the foyer. Paddy and Piggy followed suit. The porter said he would call the police. Roy said Let him. At this point I had nasty visions of Boer policemen returning us in handcuffs to O.C. Troops on the Nea Hellas, and, having failed to persuade any of my friends to join me, set off on my own.

The porter followed me. He didn’t try to restrain me or grapple with me. He simply followed me wherever I went. We wandered out for miles into the suburbs. It had now grown fully light. Finally I got a few yards in front of him and pulled myself up and over a high fence. This defeated him. I found myself in somebody’s garden and walked out of it into the road. Then I strolled back into town, had breakfast at a hotel and after sitting in the sunshine until about ten o’clock, telephoned Muriel.

Muriel said Would I like to come and see her, and off I set. We spent a delightful day at her home and addressed ourselves, amongst other things, to the matter of my pass from the ship, which had now, of course, expired. It said two a.m. all right, but it bore yesterday’s date. With infinite care we went about erasing that date so that no one could possibly perceive that it had been interfered with. We used a penknife, scraping very, very lightly. We used breadcrumbs, too. It reminded me of the bit in Edgar Allan Poe when the chap says it took him a whole hour to open the door of his sleeping enemy’s bedroom and put his head round it. Finally we put in today’s date, counterfeiting the adjacent writing very deftly and using a similar pen. No one could have detected the forgery. After that we went swimming, lay on the sand and talked about Yeats.

That night, after dinner, I swaggered up the gang-plank and presented my pass to the two military police sitting behind their table in the waist. One of them checked the pass, ticked off my name on his nominal roll in the ledger and handed the pass back to me. I had gone a few yards when he called ‘Sir.’

‘Yes, Corporal,’ I said, turning back.

‘I wouldn’t wave that about too much, sir. Today’s passes are blue, you see.’

I found the other three already back in our cabin.

‘Ah,’ said Roy, ‘the Cape Town Harriers! ‘Had a good run?’

I told them. ‘And what happened to you?’

‘Why, we stayed put, of course,’ said Roy. ‘What d’you think?’

‘And did they call the police?’

‘Yes, they did.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘Well, the police asked “Have they been violent, or used bad language, or broken anything?” And these geezers said No, we hadn’t; and the police said “In that case, we’re not interested. They’ve committed no offence.” So we hung in there till about seven-thirty and then went off to breakfast.’

They must have been British, as opposed to Afrikaans police, I thought. However, Roy’s judgment had been proved right yet again, and I felt appropriately foolish.

A day or two later we all left the Nea Hellas and went into camp at a place called Retreat. We went on enjoying Cape Town for about a week or more, until we were required to embark once again, this time on the New Amsterdam.

The New Amsterdam, a Dutch ship still staffed by the Dutch, had, like the Nea Hellas, sailed to join the Allies when her country was attacked by Hitler. She was at this time one of the largest and most luxurious liners in the world. She had no escort from Cape Town to Suez: she sailed at 25 knots in irregular zig-zags (which were perfectly all right once you’d got used to them). We were very comfortable on board and nothing eventful occurred as we went north.

We came to Suez, and thence to the big base camp at Gineifa. We were still able to stick together - an almost incredible circumstance in the Army - and had a tent for four. We knew that our comradeship was bound to be nearly over: postings would be coming in for us almost any day now. We had already been hauled up, one by one, and quizzed about our past experience and any specialist knowledge we might possess. It had been noted - though for all practical purposes it was a mere technicality - that I had spent all my time as an officer in units which were supposed to be concerned with petrol, or P.O.L. (petrol, oil and lubricants), as the Army called it. In fact I had had no specialized experience of the storage and transport of petrol.

One little incident of this time has remained in my memory. One evening, in late twilight, the four of us were having a few drinks at a cafe on the shores of the Great Bitter Lake. It was late October. The El Alamein offensive had begun a day or two before; we knew something big was happening, but news was still confined - as far as we were concerned, anyway - to talk and rumour.

As we sat chatting in the almost gone light, we became aware of a living creature on the sand near-by. It was sandy grey. Its body was flattish, a disc about as big as the palm of a human hand. It had spindly legs about as long as human fingers (you could imitate it with your hand) on which it walked, or crawled, slowly, in a stilt-like manner. Since voyaging, many years later, to Morea in the Tahiti group (where they abound) I have decided that this was a species of land crab. They are nocturnal, and live in shallow holes in the sand, to which, under the impact of light, they retreat, scuttling, rather as cockroaches do. Roy Emberson, our imperturbable, self-possessed soldier of fortune, evinced an almost cringing horror of this crustacean, and moved hastily out of the way as it came on. To him it bodied forth an epitome of the whole nature of this vile, dirty, nauseating country (we’d all had intensive gyppy tummy - diarrhoea - on arrival, of course) and several hours later he was still saying ‘I wish I hadn’t seen it.’ We had yet to encounter centipedes (akrebah), scorpions and (I, at any rate) the biting flies of the Negeb Desert. I doubt whether land crabs can hurt you: I have never given them the opportunity.

One night, a chance-met acquaintance (and I’m going to name him: he deserves it) called Lieutenant G. W. Reid asked whether I could lend him a book or two to pass the time. I lent him my first editions of Auden’s Another Time and Louis MacNeice’s Plant and Phantom, and never saw them, or Reid, again. This cured me of lending books. ‘What, lending books at twenty-two, A clean upstanding chap like you? —’

The good Lord compensated me. One morning I wandered into the N.A.A.F.I and there came upon a dog-eared little stash of battered books, paperbacks and others, for lending to the troops. Browsing and furrocking, I picked up a dingy, smallish volume, bound in what had once been light-blue. It was Emma.

I had never read Emma; or any of them, for that matter. It was like a revelation. I was glued to it a few hours later, when my posting came through. I was to report to Pal. Base in Jerusalem. In those days Jerusalem was in Palestine, a British-controlled country. It didn’t much matter to me where I was posted, as long as I could go on reading Emma. I felt sure the N.A.A.F.I. wouldn’t miss it, so I knocked it off. It anaesthetized me against the final breakup of the gang of four. Piggy’s posting had come through at the same time. We all said very English, casual good-byes to one another and went our ways. I can truly say that I little thought how those months of transit would remain in my memory locked for year after year. They had given me almost (though not quite, as I will relate) the best time I ever had in the army.