Jane Gardam - Old Filth

“No, sir. I’ve decided not.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to join up, sir.”

“We’ve just got you shipshape. You may prove we’ve been wasting our time. A very expensive case. Expensive and unsavoury. But good show.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“You will want to join the Navy, I suppose? Return to the source of the trouble?”

“No, sir. The Army. My father was in the Army. I’d like to join his old regiment.”

“No accounting for taste,” said the Commander. “Foolish of you. The sea is pretty well ours now. The going is easier. The Army’s just about to move to the thick of the last long shove. It will be slow and bloody, and you don’t look like a soldier.”

“I think I might be, sir. Given the chance.”

He felt naked on the hospital forecourt. He travelled to Gloucestershire alone. It was as terrifying as the journey to a first school, as horrible as his first walk with Babs and Claire to the Welsh baby school when he was five. He’d been feeling ill with the Welsh winter then. There had been a pain in his chest — but every time he had turned to look back at the farmhouse, Ma Didds, as usual clutching her stomach, holding her little stick, had waved him furiously on.

He missed the safety of the hospital.

Now it was a ride in a train again into a different world, the West Country, Eastward from Plymolith, across a beautiful river, soil the red of sunset, a change of trains; and into Gloucestershire. Someone had given him a bed-and-breakfast address and a warm soft-voiced old couple saw that he had a hot water bottle. There was a boiled egg for breakfast. An egg! “Joining up?” they said. “Make the most of the egg, now.” He borrowed a bike and turned up at the recruiting office, in Gloucester; where he was expected.

There were three of them behind the desk and they looked at him with considerable interest. They spoke of his health. He had been cleared one-hundred-per-cent fit and he was brown from the air and sea off Plymouth and he looked every bit of his nearly nineteen years. His hair was curly again and auburn. His weight was now normal. His eyes were alive.

“Your father’s regiment?” they said. “The Gloucesters?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know your father.”

“I’m afraid I hardly do, sir. I was on my way—”

“So we understand. There is, I suppose, no news from Changi?”

“No, sir.”

“I hope very much that we’ll hear something and that he will hear of you. Well do what we can.”

The middle one nodded at the other two who got up and went out.

“We have a proposal to make to you, Feathers. You were a member of your school’s OTC, I understand, and have done some basic training — can march and so forth?”

“Well, I could, sir.”

“It doesn’t leave you. We have decided to send you to the platoon that is guarding Queen Mary.”

Eddie stared. “But she’s well guarded, sir. And she’s in the Pacific Ocean or somewhere.”

“Not the ship. The Queen. The mother of our Monarch. She is down here in the West Country. We have one hundred and fifty men in her defence and four particular bodyguards. What’s the matter?”

“It is not s-s-soldiering, sir.”

Instead of darkening with rage, the Colonel’s blue eyes shut and opened again quickly.

“Only a run-in, Feathers. Not for the rest of the War. It is to finish your restoration. I notice you have a stammer and I have heard that it can be chronic. You would find it hard to give orders. The stammer must be removed.”

“It is only i-in-int-int-ermittent, sir. It re-t-urns when it is comm-comm-ented on.”

“You will report to Badminton barracks tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But there is one more thing. Your health.”

“I’m a hundred per cent, sir.”

“I wonder if you know what has been the matter with you, Feathers?”

“Fever, sir. A bug from Sierra Leone. Pretty lethal, I suppose. They never told me.”

“You have been infected, Feathers, with three different types of parasitic worm. And certainly from Sierra Leone.”

“Sir?”

“But that has not troubled us. The worms are gone. We know how to treat these things. But the other thing was more serious. You have been suffering from a venereal disease.”

“What is that, sir?”

The Colonel looked at him warily.

“You have been in close contact with a woman.”

“She died of gangrene, sir, on the ship after Cadiz. I only did what I could. Miss Robertson. She was over seventy—”

“I doubt that she was the source of the infection. What I am saying, Feathers, is that you have acquired sexual knowledge through a most unpalatable source. Isn’t this true?”

A long and thoughtful silence.

“It was dark, sir. I never really looked at her. I never thought of her as palatable or unpalatable. She just climbed in. I’d no idea how to do it, and she had. She gave me buttermilk, sir. It was in Northern Ireland, sir.”

The Colonel paced hurriedly across to the window and stood looking out intently.

“Were you taught nothing at school, Feathers?”

“I have won a scholarship to Oxford, sir.”

A sort of sob from the window. A pause for recovery.

“Feathers, I have decided that this disreputable episode should not be passed on to Badminton. Primarily because of Queen Mary. I hope I am not being unwise.”

“Thank you. Yes, sir. I can’t think that Queen Mary would be in any danger from me.”

“Go! Enough!” roared the Colonel. “You’re dismissed, Feathers. Go.”

Afterwards the Colonel wondered if he’d been made fun of. Beaten in argument. Run rings round.

Feathers wasn’t certain, either.

And so, this October, Filth was in a wheelchair being pushed round the Badminton meadows around Badminton House by the nice girl and her grandmother, their feet crunching on the crystalline grass. They stood at a distance from the great house.

“The cedar’s gone,” said Filth. “Well, well.”

“Oh, the cedar’s gone,” said the grandmother. “Not so very long after Queen Mary. The sixties. She’d be pleased. It was what might be called a running sore, that tree. ‘Have it down,’ she told the Duchess (and her hardly moved in!). ‘It’s in the wrong place. It blocks the light.’ ‘Lord Raglan used to climb in it,’ says her Grace. ‘It’s not to be touched.’ ‘ Over my dead body ,’ the Duchess said. I heard the very words.”

“The tree was still the issue when I arrived,” said Filth.

He had not seen Queen Mary his first month at Badminton, after a three-week OCTU course in another camp. Once he saw a silvery pillar above him on a terrace. Once again he seemed to see something moving slowly inside a long glass gallery. Then one day, reading in the vegetable garden — he had begun to order Law books from London — there she was, watching him from over the hedge. It was a hot day but she was dressed in full rig — a long coat and skirt, pearls and brooches, and a rucked hat like a turban with a sweep to it. He stood up at once and she gave a strange half-bow and turned away. There was an attendant nearby who was knitting on four-peg needles. Knitting steadily, she turned about and followed the Queen. The next week he was invited to the house to tea.

It was served in the large salon where new acquaintances were tried out. If they made the grade there would be a future invitation to Her Majesty’s private sitting-room upstairs. Big test. The Queen sat doing needlework, her lady-in-waiting sat picking over some scraps of cloth, and a fat noisy woman was shouting.

“ Over my dead body ,” she was saying, “will you cut down my tree. Cut down my spinneys, my ivy, my woodlands, my bramble bushes. Cut down my house , but not the tree.”