The Complete McAuslan (29 page)

The Colonel, who had seen through the whole question and back again in the first two minutes, looked from the pipe-major to the pipey, twisted his greying moustache, and remarked that he took the pipe-major’s point. He (the Colonel) had never seen a white man included in a troop of Zulu dancers, and he’d have thought it looked damned odd if he had.

The Adjutant, who had a happy knack of being contentious, observed that, on the other hand, he’d never heard of a white chap who
wanted
to join a troop of Zulu dancers, and would they necessarily turn him down if one (a white chap, that was) applied for membership?

The Colonel observed that he, the Colonel, wasn’t a bloody Zulu, so he wasn’t in a position to say.

The second-in-command remarked that the Gurkhas had pipe bands; damned good they were, too.

The Colonel looked at the R.S.M. ‘Mr Mackintosh?’

This, I thought, would be interesting. In those days few R.S.M.s had university degrees, or much education beyond elementary school, but long experience, and what you can only call depth of character, had given them considerable judicial wisdom; if I were on trial for murder, I’d as soon have R.S.M. Mackintosh on the bench as any judge in the land. He stood thoughtful for a moment, six and a quarter feet of kilted, polished splendour, and then inclined his head with massive dignity towards the Colonel.

‘It seems to me, sir,’ he said carefully, ‘that we have a difference of expert opeenion. The pipe-sergeant holds that this soldier is a competent piper; the pipe-major considers he is nott. But, not bein’ an expert mysel’, I don’t know what standard is required of a probationary piper?’ And he looked straight at the pipe-major, who frowned.

‘The boy’s no’ that bad,’ he conceded. ‘But . . . but he’ll look gey queer on parade, sir.’

The second-in-command said that you couldn’t put a square peg in a round hole. Not unless you forced it, anyway, in his experience.

The Adjutant said someone would be sure to make a joke about the Black Watch. Which, since we weren’t the Black Watch, would be rather pointless, of course, but still . . .

The Colonel said the Adjutant could stop talking rot, and get back to the point, which was whether Crombie was or was not a fit and proper person to be admitted to the pipe band. It seemed to the Colonel that, in spite of the pipe-major’s reservations about his proficiency, there was no reason why Crombie couldn’t achieve a satisfactory standard . . .

The second-in-command said that many black chaps were, in point of fact, extremely musical. Chap Armstrong, for example. Not that the second-in-command was particularly partial to that kind of music.

The Adjutant opened his mouth, thought better of it, and the Colonel went on to say that it wasn’t a man’s fault what colour his skin was; on the other hand, it wasn’t anyone’s fault that a pipe band was expected to present a certain appearance. There he paused, and then the pipe-sergeant, who had held his peace until the time was ripe, said:

‘Aye, right enough. Folk would laugh at us.’

The Colonel, without thinking, said stiffly: ‘Oh? Who?’

‘Oh . . . folk, sir,’ said the pipey. ‘People . . . and ither regiments . . . might . . .’

The Colonel looked at him, carefully, and you could see that the die was cast. It wasn’t that the Colonel could be kidded by the pipey; he wasn’t the kind of simpleton who would say ‘Damn what other people and other regiments think, Crombie is going to play in the pipe band, and that’s that.’ But if he now made the
opposite
decision, he might be thought to be admitting that perhaps he
did
care what other people thought. It was a very nice point, in a delicately balanced question, the pipey had just made it a little more tricky for him, and both the Colonel and the pipey knew it.

‘Mr Mackintosh?’ said the Colonel at length, and everyone knew he was looking for confirmation. He got it.

‘The pipe-major, sir, describes Crombie as nott bad,’ said the R.S.M. slowly. ‘The pipe-sergeant says he is good. So I take it he can qualify as a probationary piper. That bein’ so – we’ve taken him as a soldier. Whatever work he’s suited for, he should be given. If he’s fit to march in a rifle company, I’m poseetive he’s fit to march in the pipes and drums.’ And again he looked at the pipe-major.

‘Good,’ said the Colonel, and because he was an honest man he added: ‘I’m relieved. I’d not have cared to be the man who told Crombie the band couldn’t take him. I’ve no doubt he knows exactly how good a piper he is.’

And Crombie played in the pipe-band-having been admitted for all the wrong reasons, no doubt. I’m perfectly certain that the Colonel, the pipe-major, and the pipe-sergeant (in his own perverse way) wished that he just wasn’t there, because he did look odd, in that day and age, and there’s no use pretending he didn’t. Although, as the second-in-command remarked, some people probably thought that a pipe-band looked a pretty odd thing in the first place; some people thought it
sounded
odd, too – not as odd as those bands one saw at the cinema, though, with the chap Armstrong and fellows called Duke and Earl something-or-other. Probably not titled men at all, he suspected.

Personally, I was glad about Crombie. It wasn’t just that I felt the same way as the R.S.M. (that deep and mysterious man), but that I could see that Crombie loved what he was doing, and was good at it. And when I review my memories of that pipe-band now, fifty years on, I don’t think of Crombie at all, which probably proves something. Mention ‘pipers’ to me, and my immediate recollection is of ‘Johnnie Cope’, and the way they used to batter our ear-drums on a Friday at dawn.

Incidentally, that peculiar little bit of subaltern-baiting came to an abrupt end, thanks to the cunning of Lieutenant Mackenzie, in a week when I was out on detachment. It seems that the Colonel stayed late in the mess one Thursday night, his wife being away in Cairo, and yarned on with the subalterns in the ante-room until after two in the morning. And being too tired to make the two-mile drive home to the married quarters, he accepted the suggestion of Mackenzie that he stay over for the night – in a vacant room in the subalterns’ quarters. So the Colonel borrowed a pair of pyjamas and burrowed in for the night, remarking cheerfully that he hoped he’d sleep as soundly as he used to do when he, too, was a one-pipper with not a care in the world.

‘And he did, too – until precisely 6 a.m.,’Mackenzie informed me later. ‘And then the pipey and his gang sneaked up, as usual, and took deep breaths, and started blowing the bloody roof off, right outside the old boy’s kip. I’ve never,’ Mackenzie went on contentedly, ‘actually seen a hungry vulture with a fire-cracker tied to its leg. And, brother, I don’t need to. He came out of that room like Krakatoa erupting, fangs bared and blood in his eye. I’d no idea the old man could shift like that. And I’ll bet you’ve never seen an entire pipe band in full flight, either – not just retreating, but running like hell, and somebody with his foot through the big drum. If the Colonel hadn’t been in bare feet, he’d have caught someone, and there’d have been murder done. Anyway, when the smoke had cleared, he was understood to say that the pipe-band could henceforth sound “Johnnie Cope” on the other side of the barracks, round Support Company, and if they ever set foot within two hundred yards of any officers’ quarters again, he, personally, would reorganise them in several unusual ways. This is an edited version, of course. And that,’ concluded Mackenzie smugly, ’is the pipey’s eye on a plate. Thank your clever old Kenny. We’ll sleep in peace on Fridays after this.’

Strangely enough, we didn’t. Probably we were suffering from withdrawal symptoms, but Friday reveille, with only the distant drift of the band, found us fractious and peevish. Even my room-mate said he missed it, rather; he liked the bit where the drummers crashed out their tattoo at the beginning, it made him feel all martial, he said. We didn’t actually go the length of asking the band to come back, but there was no doubt of it, Friday wasn’t the same any more.

The only time I heard them beat reveille outside the subalterns’ quarters again was a long time after, when we had moved back to Edinburgh, and the old Colonel had gone. It was on my last Friday in the Army, just before I was demobilised, and I like to think it was the pipey’s farewell gift. It had all the old effect – I finished up against the far wall, thrashing feebly in a state of shock, while ‘Johnnie Cope’ came thundering in like a broadside. I had a new room-mate by this time, a stranger to the battalion, and when he could make himself heard he announced his intention – he was a large, aggressive young man – of going out and putting an immediate stop to it.

‘Don’t you dare,’ I shouted above the din. ‘Let them alone. And think yourself privileged.’

Nowadays, in my old age, I’m accustomed to waking up in the ordinary way, with a slightly fuzzy feeling, and a vague discontent, and my old broken shoulder aching, and twinges in my calves and ankles. And sometimes, if my thoughts turn that way, I can think smugly that one of the compensations nowadays is that there are no tables to scrub, or men of ill-will hitting the coal-bucket with the poker, or hounding me out into the ablutions through the snow – and then I feel sad, because never again will I hear ‘Johnnie Cope’ in the morning.

General Knowledge, Private Information

All my life I have been plagued by a marvellous memory for totally useless information. Probably no other human being now alive could tell you (or would want to, for that matter), all in one breath, that the woman in whose coal cellar Guy Fawkes hid his explosives was called Mrs Bright, that Casanova, Charlemagne, and Hans Andersen were all born on 2 April, and that Schopenhauer couldn’t abide carters cracking whips beneath his bedroom window. And add, for good measure, the names of the Oxford batsmen who succumbed to Cobden’s devastating hat-trick in the University match of 1870.

You get no marks for knowing these things, as people were always telling me at school. Other children knew the subjunctive of
moneo,
and exactly where to drop the perpendicular in Pythagoras, how to dissect an adverbial clause (I didn’t even know what an adverb was, and don’t push me even now), and how to do volumetric analysis. They absorbed these matters without difficulty, and poured them out on to paper at examinations, while I sat pathetically, having scrawled my name, and the number‘ 1’ in the margin, wondering if the examiners would allow me anything for knowing that the ice-cream Chico Marx sold in
A Day at the Races
was ‘tutsi-fruitsi’, and that there was an eighteenth-century buccaneer who became Archbishop of York, that the names of the
Bounty’s
quartermasters were Norton and Lenkletter, or that Martin Luther suffered from piles.

It wasn’t even respectable general knowledge, and heaven knows I tried to forget it, along with the identities of the playing cards in Wild Bill Hickok’s hand when he was shot, the colours of all the football teams in the old Third Division (Northern Section), and the phrase for ‘Do you surrender?’ in the language which Tarzan spoke to the apes. But it still won’t go away. And an exhaustive knowledge of utter rubbish is not a social asset (ask anyone who has been trapped next to me at a party) or of more than limited use in keeping up with a television quiz show. Mr Paxman’s alert, glittering-eyed young men, bristling with education, jab at their buzzers and rattle out streams of information on Sumerian architecture and Gregorian music and the love poetry of John Donne while I am heaving about in my armchair with my mouth full, knocking over tea-cups and babbling frantically: ‘Wait, wait! – King’s. Evil! No, no, dammit – the other thing that Shelley’s nurse died of – didn’t she? – No, wait – Dr Johnson – or Lazarus – or, or what’s his name? – in that play – not bloody Molière! – hang on, it’s coming! The . . . the other one – with the drunk grandee who thinks he’s somebody’s father . . .’

And by then they are on to Hindemith or equestrian statues at Sinigaglia. It is no consolation to be able to sit growling jealously that there isn’t one of them who could say who it was that Captain Kidd hit over the head with a bucket, or what it was that Claude Rains dropped into a wastepaper basket in the film
Casablanca
– and then memory of a different kind takes hold, and I am back in the tense and smoky atmosphere of the Uaddan Canteen, sweating heavily on the platform with the other contestants, and not a murmur from the Jocks and Fusiliers packed breathlessly waiting in the body of the hall, with a two-pound box of Turkish Delight and the credit of the regiment to play for, as the question-master adjusts his spectacles, fixes me with a malevolent smile, and asks:

‘What were the names of the five seventeenth-century statesmen whose initials made up the word “Cabal”?’

There are no such general knowledge quizzes nowadays-and no such sublimely-inspired authorities as Private McAuslan, savant, sage, universal man, and philosopher extraordinary. For reviewing his long, unsoldierly, and generally insanitary career, I’d say that that was McAuslan’s big moment, when he rose above his unseemly self and stood forth whole, a bag of chips in his hand and the divine fire of revelation in his mind.

If you doubt this, I can only tell you that I was there and saw it happen. But to explain it properly, and obtain a true perspective, I have to go back a few days earlier to the battalion concert which, along with the Colonel’s liver, was the origin of the whole thing.

If you have attended a battalion concert in an overseas garrison you will know that they are, theatrically speaking, unique – and not merely because nothing works, including the curtain. The whole production is ill-conceived and badly underrehearsed to begin with, half the cast have to be press-ganged into appearance, the standard of performance would shame a kindergarten pantomime, the piano is untuned, the lighting intermittent, C Company’s tenor (who thinks he is Scotland’s answer to Gigli) butchers his way through ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Because God made thee mine’ to demented applause from the sentimental soldiery, one of the storemen does conjuring tricks with a pullthrough and pieces of four-by-two cleaning cloth, the idiot Lieutenant MacNeill, shuffling and crimson with embarrassment, does his supposedly comic monologue and dies standing up, the Adjutant, who is prompting in the wings, loses his script and puts the entire stage-crew under close arrest in a voice shrill with hysteria while the audience roars ‘Encore’, and everybody on the safe side of the footlights loves it. Except the Colonel.