Above my cabin—my double cabin in the after part of the boat—there was open deck, and my surprise may be guessed, if not measured, when I was roused from dreamless slumber by the noise of rowdy entertainment going on immediately overhead. Why, I wondered, were Roderick and Andrew enjoying some sort of concert on the after deck, and where had they found the harmonium—for such I judged it to be—on which one or the other was playing the accompaniment to a long set of bawdy verses?
The tune—a very simple one—I recognised immediately. In my youth I had known it well. My youth, as I have said before, came to an end in the nonsensically heroic confusion of the first great war, and in the intervals of a service which was arduous at the best of times, and next door to insufferable at the worst, we often let our minds escape into a Tom Tiddler’s ground, between fantasy and smut, of bawdy songs. I’m not scholar enough to be quite sure of the difference between ‘bawdy’ and ‘erotic’, but I think most of our bawdiness was consolation—by way of mocking what we couldn’t get—for the almost endemic lack of erotic pleasure in our daily life: in those days it wasn’t only active service that imposed chastity, but the way we had been brought up.—I’m speaking, of course, of respectable young men of the middle classes, of whom, in our country, there used to be a very large number.—And some of the songs we sang were very good, though not, of course, ‘good’ in the moralist’s sense of the word.
There was, for instance, a quite uncountable set of limericks based on a sort of obscene geography. In space they ranged from Madras to Lewisham Junction, from Siberia to Lucca, from Birmingham to Algiers and the Cape of Good Hope—I would need an atlas to remember a tenth of them—and in theme the gamut stretched from the simplest kind of self-indulgence to wild aberrations beyond all normal capacity. We sang them to a simple, repetitious tune that led to an absurd chorus: ‘Oh, won’t you come up, come all the way up, come all the way up to Limerick!’
That was the tune now being played on a harmonium on the open deck above my cabin, but though I strained my ears to catch the words I could hear nothing with any certainty until—as if a television machine had suddenly been adjusted—I was listening to Roderick—I think it was Roderick—singing, with startling clarity:
‘But the pride of his life
Were the breasts of his wife,
One real one and one india-rubber bub.’
It worried me that I couldn’t remember the opening lines, and the sound of argument on the deck above suggested that Roderick and Andrew were in dispute about the correct or accepted version. There was a little while of silence, or of muttered debate, and then from the harmonium came a very different sort of tune—the good tune of ‘John Peel’—and lustily the brothers sang:
‘When you wake up in the morning full of sexual joy,
And your wife’s unwilling, and her sister’s rather coy,
Just whistle through the window for the gardener’s boy, And revel in the joys of copulation.’
That, of course, was a favourite song of the Royal Flying Corps, that existed, very precariously, before the Royal Air Force came into being. Young officers, who never lived to grow old, in tight-fitting, rather Continental-looking tunics. They flew machines built of cardboard and string in a nursery of aeronautic science and came limping home, if they were lucky, at tree-top height over our lines. They were reputed to drink too much and fly their early-morning sorties in pyjamas.
With a fine spirit the brothers sang the rollicking chorus:
‘Cats on the roof-top, cats on the tiles,
Cats with pleurisy and cats with piles,
Cats with their arses wreathed in smiles As they revel in the joys of copulation.’
It brought slow, sad tears to my eyes, for my cousin Jack Gaffikin, two years older than I, was killed early in 1917, flying a Sopwith Pup. A handsome, wild young man whom I much admired. I was once his guest in a ramshackle mess, and we sang ‘Cats on the Roof-top’—which I had not heard before—under the baton of a self-appointed choirmaster with what I remember as ritual splendour. Jack was killed a few weeks later, and I wrote in my diary:
‘Now Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.’
Both my elder brothers were dead by then, and three or four cousins followed before the end of it. As well as all my friends.
That, perhaps, is a slight exaggeration. But very slight. I was a lonely man when the war was over; and so remained for most of my life.
But this melancholy mood was banished when the indefatigable brothers struck up another old tune—one that I had long forgotten, but now remembered with vivid pleasure:
‘Oh, me true love’s a soldier, an’ gone to the war,
An’ the badge that he wore was a bright shining star!’
As soon as I heard that I began to dress in haste, for the only man I had heard sing it before was a great character and the best subaltern I ever had. What became of him I don’t know, but quickly it occurred to me that if the brothers knew his song, they might have known him.
Dick Rankine was a student at Glasgow University who, in the long summer vacation, used to get a job as purser in one of the Clyde pleasure-steamers, and brought with him into the Army an enormous repertory of rough and raucous stories. He soon became popular, and more than popular when, as a second lieutenant, he won an immediate D.S.O. for a platoon attack that he led ‘with reckless gallantry and outstanding success’, as the Gazette reported. He used to sing his song—it went to a vulgar, bumpy waltz-tune—with an exaggerated Irish accent; and the brothers had the very trick of it:
‘Oh, me true love’s a soldier, an’ gone to the war,
An’ the badge that he wore was a bright shining star,
He’s as bold as a lion an’ as black as the tomb,
An’ he fell deep in love wid me ould musharoom.
‘The first time I met him ‘twas early last fall,
He was dancing the waltz at Finnegan’s Ball,
He tipped me the wink as he waltzed round the room,
Then he made a bold dash at me ould musharoom.
‘Hush-a-bye, baby, go to sleep on me knee,
If your daddy were here, he’d sure to love thee,
Hush-a-bye, baby, go to sleep, you young coon,
I’ve a friend wants a smack at me ould musharoom….’
I had finished dressing, and now hurried on deck. Or rather, I set out with the intention of hurrying, but had some difficulty in finding my way. In some strange fashion the accommodation below deck had taken on a new design, a different shape and pattern; and stranger still, it was broad daylight when at last I emerged.
I had made no mistake about the harmonium, however. The harmonium stood on the after deck, and Andrew was again vigorously playing and peddling. But I was utterly unprepared for the appearance that he and Roderick presented, for both were dressed, with the utmost formality, in black coats and striped trousers—they wore white shirts, starched collars, neat grey ties—and as I approached them my previous mood was abruptly dismissed by the solemnity of their music. It was a hymn tune that Andrew now was playing, and as Roderick held up a warning hand they both began to sing, with stentorian devotion:
‘There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where my dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.’
I waited respectfully till they had finished, and Roderick explained. ‘It’s our day for examining the children,’ he said, ‘and we’ve found by experience that a short, preliminary service of prayer and worship gives us great help in an unpleasant ordeal. And today, Mr. Gaffikin, we hope that you’ll accompany us, and see for yourself the good work we’re doing. It’s only a short walk of a hundred yards or so.’
I saw then that we were moored alongside—though I did not recognise the quay—and before we went ashore Roderick and Andrew put on bowler hats, to complete their formal costume, and on the leather brief-cases they carried I read the black inscription: H.M. Inspector of Schools.
I was deeply impressed, and so was the janitor who admitted us to a large, glass-and-concrete school of the most modern aspect. So also were the headmaster, who waited to receive us, and the teacher, with grey hair and anxious eyes, to whose class-room we were conducted.
Behind their little desks about thirty children—boys and girls of fifteen or sixteen years—regarded us glumly, and my own spirits sank as deeply as theirs when I saw, on well-lighted shelves, a great array of glass jars and tanks that preserved in alcohol an assortment of neatly butchered human organs, and dissections of what used to be called our private parts. They were certainly not designed for publicity.
It was Roderick who addressed the children, and even I responded, with a thrill of awe, to his deep voice, a rolling intonation like the outline of Border hills, and a Scotchness deliberately assumed for the occasion.
‘Fearfully and wonderfully are we made,’ he declared. ‘About that there can be no dispute, and naebody can doubt it who kens what he ought to ken of the unco contents of the human wame or kyte. That crowded cavern between your midriff and your doup, that scientists call the abdomen, is full of ferlies. It’s there, in the pit-mirk of your belly, that the secrets of life lie dern and dark, and the miraculous process of evolution is re-enacted in every generation. Ilka lassie here carries among the gear and graith of her endowment, like a wee crock in an awmry, a small purse or satchel called the uterus. You ken its importance, but what’s incumbent on you, too, is to study its intricate geography, the structure of the cardinal ligament and the course of the uterine artery until you know them as weel as you know the streets of your ain toun. Ay, as weel as you know the place and function of every chair and creepie in your ain hoose.’
He loomed over the cowering children like the priest of some ancient faith above chastened tribesmen, and continued: ‘All of you began your lives in that small purse or satchel. You swam in a wee puddle of watter like tadpoles or sticklebacks, and the proamise of life, vouchsafed to you in the beginning, created at long last a nucleus of intelligence; which in many cases, as your examiners will doubtless conclude, remains today no better than a nucleus.
‘And how, you will ask, was that great proamise conveyed? If a wee puddle of watter in a lassie’s uterus became the hoamologue or example of that primeval ocean in which the amoeba and the innocent Paramecium swam, unconscious of high destiny, then some intrusive instrument must have been used. An instrument analogous to God’s holy purpose in waking the sleeping oceans of the world. The anaatomy of that instrument must be studied with reverence, and a knoawledge of its innervation will be of unfailing help in the long debate with life to which you are committed.—You, there I That boy with red hair. Tell me what you know of the seminal vesicles. Where are they situated, and what’s their function?’
A lanky, freckle-faced boy with carroty hair stood up, flushed scarlet, and wondered where to put his large red hands. He knew nothing about the seminal vesicles, but thought they had something to do with locomotion.
‘I said vesicles, not bicycles!’ Roderick’s voice was now truly intimidating. It filled the room with thunder as he demanded: ‘What would have become of you if your faither had known no more than you do? Do you think you would be here today? You would not! And if your faither’s faither had been as ignorant as you are, your faither might never have been born, and how would your poor mither have fared in that case? Doesna that thought daunton and diminish you, you idle, glaikit coof? Little use will you be to the future of mankind.’
He stood, for almost a minute, shaking his great sunburnt head, and a young, pale-faced man, with a mild manner, came in to tell Andrew that the senior class was now ready for its practical examination.
Andrew asked me if I would like to go with him, but after a moment’s reflection I said I would prefer to stay with Roderick; and Andrew, telling his brother that he did not intend to waste any time, went off with a brisk and businesslike stride.
Roderick, with a manifestly false assumption of geniality, said to his unhappy audience, ‘Weel, noo, let’s see if a lassie canna do better than that sumph of a boy. Fancy not knowing about the seminal vesicles! Well, well. But you—that lassie with spectacles and long black hair—can you tell me what happens to the ovum in the ovarian follicle?’
She was a large girl, robustly made, and apparently a girl of some character. She stood up and said decisively, ‘It undergoes degeneration.’
‘Good, good,’ said Roderick. ‘Indeed that is what happens to most of them. But suppose—and aiblins this occurs—suppose that in flight from general destruction a chitterin wee ovum is shed from its ovary. What happens then?’
‘That’ll be in the next chapter,’ said the black-haired girl, ‘and I havena read it.’
‘So then,’ said Roderick, ‘you ken nothing about the corrpus luteum?’
‘No,’ said the girl.
‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘And at the age of sixteen you’ve no knowledge of the corrpus luteum?’
The poor girl, so confident till now, began to show signs of uneasiness. She looked from side to side, seeking help from those who sat near her, but none of them, it was clear, had any more knowledge than she had; and a sense of insufficiency, if not of guilt, distorted their features and drove the blood from their cheeks.
The robust and bespectacled girl began to cry. ‘I think it has something to do with daith,’ she said.
‘It has mair to do with life,’ said Roderick in a hollow voice. ‘But I’ll give you one more chance. I’ll be generous and forgive your ignorance if you can answer another question. Let us suppose that you are deid—after a motor-car accident, maybe—and you’re brought in here, a cauld clay corp, and I’m here to make exaamination of your remains. Weel, then, where would I have to look for your ovaries?’
‘In my abdominal cavity,’ she said in a quavering voice.
‘Ay, that’s right. But your abdoaminal caavity’s like a muckle great cellar, and nae a toom cellar, but full to the roof with strange contraptions, with essential organs, and an awesome drainage system that lies coiled in the darkness like a nest of writhing snakes. You can hear it whiles, when a stishie of wind goes whistling through its tubes like a storm in the lum, and the wit of man has never devised anything like it. But if I’m going to mak search for your wee ovaries in that habitaation of snakes, I’ll need help to find them. So tell me would I do best to look fornenst your kidneys?’
‘No,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Then abune or below?’
From either side of her came whispered but contrary advice. ‘Abune,’ hissed some. ‘Below,’ muttered others. The black-haired girl, now manifestly distraught, guessed wrong and said, ‘Above.’
Roderick, with a growl of wrath, relapsed into broad Scotch and said, ‘Muckle good will your ovaries ever do you, my lass. Awa’ hame and tell your mither she micht hae been spared her pain.’
Weeping bitterly, that great girl ran clumsily out of the class-room, and Roderick, with a renewed mutter of anger, turned towards a blackboard on which were pinned two clearly illustrative diagrams of the lower abdominal parts and reproductive organs of the human male and female.
‘It seems to me,’ he said—his voice still harsh with disappointment—‘that you ken so little about your own bodies that you’ll never be able to put them to any decent purpose. For ignorance means impotence, and God will never admit to the ineffable pleasures of true love those sweer and thowless creatures who winna tak tent to learn the whereabouts and structure of the vital parts of their social mechanism. Such parts, to mention only a few, as the epididymis, the prostate gland, and the pampiniform plexus of veins. Ay, the pampiniform plexus! A map of all the tributaries of the River Clyde would pale into insignificance beside it. And equally impoartant are the Fallopian tubes, their embryonic development, and their intimate relations. Now on these diagrams all those parts are clearly shown, and I want you to name them as I point to them.’
For a little while the answers came quickly, though not always accurately, but when Roderick asked more searching questions, about structure and function, the children again grew sulky and unhappy. A small boy with a quite circular head was so unfortunate as to identify in the female diagram an essential part of the male apparatus, and that roused Roderick to another display of anger. Before he had done more, however, than launch his denunciation of the child’s stupidity, he was interrupted by Andrew’s return, who came into the class-room with the abrupt announcement, ‘They’re no good, no good at all. Not one of them.’
‘You’ve been looking at the practical work, Mr. MacPhee?’
‘I have.’
‘And they’re no good, you say?’
‘No good at all. Slipshod, hurried, and ineffectual. Not one of them had any notion of the physiology of motivation, and none of them, as I was bound to tell them, could entertain any hope of satisfying the examiners.’
‘A disappointing experience.’
‘A gloomy prospect, Mr. MacPhee.’
‘And here in this class-room,’ said Roderick, ‘I’ve been equally disappointed. There seems no interest in the subject.
No interest at all. A partan under the dabberlack of the shore kens mair about its business than these daft loons and fusionless queans. They havena learnt the very elements of life, and without knowledge of the elements, what can they look forward to?’
‘Lives of total ineptitude,’ said Andrew.
‘The blight of ignorance is spreading owre the hale community, and if you speer at me, it willna be long before lads and lassies canna tell the difference between male and female,’
Again he faced the children cowering behind their inadequate desks, and demanded, ‘How many of you ken the difference?’
A girl, less submissive than the majority, said sullenly, ‘My mither goes out to work, and my faither bides at home.’
Encouraged by her example, a nondescript boy said, ‘My faither gets drunk, and my mither beats him.’
‘There’s a bigger difference than that,’ said Roderick. ‘There is, in fact, a vast difference.’
He was, to my surprise, no longer angry. Quite the opposite, indeed, for on his large brown face appeared an expression both arch and self-conscious—the dreadful, waggish look of one who is about to tell a time-honoured joke—and turning to the blackboard he exclaimed, ‘And there you can see it!’
He pointed to a duct in the male diagram, and let out a bark of laughter. That sort of laughter which schoolmasters reserve for the scholastic witticism which only they appreciate. He traced the pink-painted duct with his forefinger and said, ‘It exists only in the male, you see. The vas deferens of which I spoke!’
His laughter—which Andrew loyally deepened—visibly increased the gloom that afflicted those thirty children, and when we withdrew into the corridor where the headmaster was waiting for us—and where, after a moment or two, the master whose class we had examined joined us—we stood for a little while in mutual congratulation.
To the headmaster and his assistant master Roderick said, ‘You’ve done splendid work, gentlemen, splendid work indeed. In all those children you’ve planted a deep distrust of the sexual mechanism that should go far—yes, very far—towards leaving in them a crippling revulsion from the sexual act. I’ll have great pleasure in telling the Minister himself of the valuable service you’re rendering to humanity.’
‘It’s most kind of you to say so, Mr. MacPhee,’ replied the headmaster, ‘but we could do very little if it weren’t for your help and understanding. In the practical tests today, Mr. Andrew MacPhee was the very essence of discouragement. He daunted the children like another Ice Age.’
‘It’s what we’re here for,’ said Roderick. ‘We do our duty, and what man can do more? Good-bye, sir, and speed the good work with all your strength.’
We went out into a bright morning under a broken sky, and Andrew said, with deep feeling, ‘If all schools were conducted as well as that one, copulation would have no more sex-appeal than Shylock’s uncle.’
We walked on for a little way, and I remembered that my original reason for leaving my cabin, and joining them on deck, was to ask if they had ever known Dick Rankine, my young subaltern who used to sing ‘My True Love’s a Soldier’; but when I turned to speak to them, they had vanished.
I was all alone—somewhere on an unknown sea-front—and for several minutes I felt deeply perturbed. But then, not far away, I saw the yacht Independence, and walking briskly towards her I went aboard, and down the companion-way to my cabin where, quickly undressing, I tumbled into bed and in a moment was fast asleep.