The Complete McAuslan (34 page)

‘I know all about Maryhill Barracks,’ said the Colonel, testily. ‘Get on with it.’

‘Well, the chap was taken unawares, it seems, sir, by other people shouting, er, “Honey pears”, you see.’

‘And what in God’s name are honey pears?’

‘Well, actually,’ the Adjutant was beginning to flounder, when Bennet-Bruce put in:

‘I think it’s rhyming slang, sir, like “apples and pears” for stairs. It’s one of the Jocks’ slogans.’

‘Ah,’ said the Colonel wisely. He knew, if anyone did, about those curious barbaric cries like ‘Way-ull’ and ‘Oh-h, Sarah!’ and ‘Sees-tu’ which are the curious currency of the Scottish soldier’s speech; they come, no one usually knows whence, and as often as not vanish as inexplicably. ‘Well, go on,’ he told the Adjutant.

‘Well, sir, they also shout “Get up the . . . the, er, them stairs.” You’ve heard them shouting it to each other, sir, I’m sure. Not just in our battalion; it’s a catch-phrase on the wireless.’ Which, of course, it was, round about the end of the war.

‘But the bit about the fruit?’ inquired the Colonel. ‘What’s that about green things for Fenians?’

The Adjutant was looking buffaloed, so I helped him out.

‘It isn’t really easy to explain, sir. Green is the Catholic colour – Celtic, and so on – and the implication is that Fenians – Catholics – will be eager to buy, er, green yins – green ones, green groceries, and so forth. There are alternative endings to the song, like “Cherries for the hairies” – ’

‘What’s a hairy?’

‘A girl, sir, in Glasgow. Pronounced herry. And I’ve heard “Grapes for the Papes”, too, sir.’

‘Pape means a Roman Catholic,’ said the Adjutant brightly, and the Colonel withered him with a look.

‘I’m not entirely ignorant, Michael. It seems to me this song has decided religious overtones. Extraordinary. Is it intended to be provocative, I wonder? – I gather from the sporting news that Celtic aren’t doing too well these days. However, this has nothing to do with pistol-shooting, gentlemen, fascinating though it may be. McAuslan’s in your platoon, isn’t he, Dand? Well, tell the brute to confine his singing to the canteen, or somewhere where I don’t have to listen to it.’

Which was hardly fair, when you consider how eager he’d been to hear the rest of it, but colonels are like that. So are company commanders; Bennet-Bruce tore mild strips off me afterwards because it had been one of my Jocks who had disturbed the peace of the Colonel’s sanctum. ‘You’ll have to do something about that chap,’ he said. ‘It’s bad enough that he goes absent about once a month and is, at a conservative estimate, the filthiest thing that ever put on uniform. We can’t have him caterwauling under H.Q. Company windows as well.’

‘I didn’t create McAuslan,’ I protested. ‘I just got him wished on me – by you, I may point out.’

‘Haven’t heard him singing before, at that,’ said Bennet-Bruce, skilfully changing the subject. ‘It’s odd – I mean, he’s a pretty morose specimen, isn’t he? Anyway, chew him up a bit, will you?’

I didn’t, of course. There’s no point, with the McAuslans of this world. And I wouldn’t have given his vocalising another thought if I hadn’t heard him at it again, in D Company ablutions, on the following day. This time it was ‘Don’t fence me in’, with what he supposed was an American accent. I addressed Private Forbes, who was sitting on his bed with some of the boys.

‘Forbes,’ I said, ‘what’s with McAuslan?’

‘You mean, havin’ a wash?’

‘He’s washing, you say? And singing. What’s he got to be so happy about?’

Forbes and the boys grinned. ‘Search me, sir,’ said Forbes, and from the secret look on his face I knew something was going on. There’s a curious military shorthand which exists, in a Jock’s expression and tone of voice, and if you can read it, it’s worth a dozen confidential reports. I wasn’t expert, like the Colonel, who could limp through a barrack-room kit inspection, smiling under his brows, and tell you afterwards which men were anxious about something, and which were content, and which were plotting devilment. But I was getting to know my platoon a little.

‘It’s a rerr terr,’ observed Daft Bob Brown.

‘McAuslan hivin’ a bath,’ said Forbes.

‘See the man wi’ the padded shoulders,’ said McGlinchey, and began to hum, ‘Cuddle up a little closer, baby mine’, at which the boys chuckled and winked at each other.

‘How’s Mr Grant and Mr MacKenzie gettin’ oan wi’ the wee brammer frae the hospital?’ asked Forbes irrelevantly, and seeing my look, added hastily: ‘Aw-right, sir, Ah’m no’ lookin’ at you! Ah’m no’ lookin’ at you! Jist askin’.’

‘Jist askin’,’ said Daft Bob.

‘Whay-hay-hay-ull,’ murmured McGlinchey.

‘No kiddin’, those two ought tae be gettin’ bromide in their tea,’ said Forbes.

‘Nae haudin’ them in.’

‘She’s a wee stotter, though, sho she is.’

They nudged each other and avoided my eye. Right, I thought, two can play at this game, so I observed casually:

‘When was our last platoon route march – two weeks ago, wasn’t it? I think we ought to have another in the next day or so. The long one, down to Fort Yarhuna, where the sand is. We can camp out overnight.’ I gave them my benign platoon commander’s beam. ‘And sweep under your bed, Forbes, it’s filthy. McGlinchey, I saw rifle oil on your small pack this morning; show it scrubbed at company office by five o’clock. Right, carry on.’

This is known as panicking them; I left the barrack-room in the comforting knowledge that they were calling down curses on my head and each others’ – Forbes’s especially, for provoking discord with sly allusions. It was all trivial stuff, of course, but interesting in its way. What, I wondered, could McAuslan’s taking a bath – a portent, admittedly – have to do with the romantic entanglements of Lieutenants Grant and MacKenzie? My platoon obviously knew, and were disposed to be merrily sly.

As to Grant and MacKenzie, there was no mystery. They were the leading contenders in the championship for Ellen Ramsey, a phenomenon who had arrived on the scene a few weeks previously. She was the daughter of the R.A.M.C. colonel who ran the local military hospital, and, in the descriptive phrase of Private Forbes, a wee brammer, or, if you prefer it, a stotter. To quote the Adjutant, she had the message for the chaps. She was about nineteen, and as beautiful as only an English girl can be, very blonde, very cool, and with a smile like a toothpaste advertisement. The sight of her skipping across the tennis court in her white shorts had moved even the second-in-command of the battalion, an aged bachelor who despised all women, to bite through the stern of his pipe; even the Colonel observed that she was a damned nice gel, unlike the usual little floozies who distract my subalterns and cause ’em to make fools of themselves. That was the unusual thing about Ellen Ramsey; she wasn’t just beautiful, she was nice with it.

So thought every man in the garrison, with Grant and MacKenzie well ahead of the field, and their rivalry, in that enclosed society, was what Forbes would have called ‘the talk o’ the steamie’, which means common gossip. There was apparently no other competition – there seldom is, where Highlanders are concerned. They have a built-in advantage in the uniform, of course, which seems to attract women like flies; even American airmen, loaded with money and Hollywood glamour, can’t really compete. I think, too, there is possibly a kind of barbaric magnetism about military Scotsmen – ’it is,’ as small, plump, bald and bespectacled Major Bakie of Support Company used to say, ‘the wild beast in us, the primitive, feral quality of the bens and glens and things.’ He presumably knew, since he was married with a large family.

In any event, Grant and MacKenzie competed hotly for the favours of Ellen Ramsey, and the community watched with mild interest.

Personally, I couldn’t have cared less. I was a confirmed misogynist of about ten days’ standing, as a result of my trip to Malta with the battalion football team. There, in the intervals of going frantic over the team’s performance and frustrating the villainies of Lieutenant Samuels, R.N., who had tried to harness their ability to his own money-mad schemes, I had become impassioned of a pert brunette in the paymaster’s department, who had given me over for a sergeant in the Pioneer Corps (a sergeant, and a pioneer at that). I had rebounded to a red-haired temptress named Gale something-or-other, who had drunk my Pimms No. Is and eaten my dinners at Chez Jim’s, and had then turned out to be engaged to a local civilian.

So I had brought my fractured heart and ego back to North Africa, a changed and bitter man. I was through with women – finished, you understand. I could view even Ellen Ramsey with a dispassionate and jaundiced eye, smiling cynically at the folly of those who danced attendance on her. She didn’t interest me. Anyway, MacKenzie was two inches taller than I was, with the flaming red hair of his tribe, and an undoubted gift of charm, and Grant owned a Hudson Terraplane. So I didn’t mind taking up snooker again.

But Ellen Ramsey’s affairs were all a far cry from McAuslan taking a bath, or so I thought until I had occasion to visit the hospital a couple of days later to see one of my Jocks who was recovering from a broken leg. Mrs Ramsey, Ellen’s mother, a chatty, fearfully-fearfully Army wife who was the hospital’s unofficial almoner, invited me to stay for tea, and in the course of a nonstop recital of the difficulty of getting domestic help in North Africa and the handlessness of Arab women as hospital staff, she suddenly asked:

‘By the way, I wonder if you know a soldier in your battalion – yes, he must be in your battalion, because he wears a kilt, and talks in that strange way – I can
never
understand it – yes, he’s called McAllan, or McClossan – something like that?’ ‘Would it be McAuslan, perhaps?’ I wondered.

She said, yes, it would be, such an
odd
man. That clinched it; I admitted, cautiously, that I thought I had heard the name.

‘We see a great deal of him here,’ she said. ‘At least, Ellen does. I’m not quite sure about him – he seems rather, well – rough, you know. Oh, quite harmless, I’m sure, but he hangs about, you know what I mean, in such a silent way, and he looks – well, rather uncouth. I don’t mean to be unkind, because he’s always perfectly civil, when he talks, which he seldom does – not to me, at least, but of course I hardly see him. He seems very interested in Ellen, but of course all young men are – we’ve grown used to that.’ She gave that whimsical, satisfied, fed-up smile. ‘But he is rather different – well, he is rather . . .’ she hunted for a word and came out with a beauty – ‘. . . shop-soiled, I think. Common, really.’

Uncommon, was the way I’d have described McAuslan, but for the rest I knew exactly what she meant. Having him about the premises was rather like playing host to Peking Man, until you got used to it. But her report was disturbing.

‘Do you mean he annoys Ellen?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no – not at all. She rather likes him – and he was very good to her, really. Rather a knight-errant, in fact. You know that Ellen shops in the afternoons, down at the bazaar, for flowers and fruit and things for the patients? Well, on one of her first trips, a week or so ago, she went beyond the main market, down to the place they call the Old Suk, near the harbour – ’ I knew it, a rough quarter, and out of bounds to troops. ‘She tried to buy something from a stall – I forget what – and the proprietor, who seems to have been one of the more beastly Arab vendors, got unpleasant, and tried to bully her into buying at an exorbitant price. She wouldn’t, of course, and then some of his friends collected, and one of them tried to get her wrist-watch, and it was all very horrid and frightening, as you can imagine, because of course she doesn’t speak any Arabic, and there wasn’t a white person about, and they were menacing her-you know what they can be like. Of course, she was a little idiot to go there unescorted, but she didn’t know, you see.’

I saw, and knowing what out-of-bounds markets in the Middle East can be like, I could guess that for a girl straight out from England it must have been a terrifying experience.

‘Well, it was becoming really unpleasant, with these awful people pawing at her, and trying to snatch her shoppingbag, and laughing, and so forth, when suddenly this man McCollin – ’

‘McAuslan.’

‘ – came on the scene. He asked her if she was all right, and she told him, and he turned on the biggest Arab, and told him in no uncertain terms to take himself off.’ That must have been something to hear, too. ‘But the Arabs wouldn’t, at first, so he suddenly rushed at one of them, and knocked him down. That seemed to bring them to their senses, for they left Ellen and McAllan alone, and he brought her back to the main shopping streets. She was badly shaken, poor child, and it was really awfully kind of him.’

One up to you, McAuslan, I thought; that’s your next offence scrubbed off before you’ve committed it. He could have got himself very badly beaten up, or even killed, mixing it with the kind of unlicensed victuallers who inhabited the Old Suk – where he had no business to be, of course, but that was by the way.

‘And since then,’ Mrs Ramsey continued, ‘he seems to have appointed himself Ellen’s unofficial bodyguard. She finds him waiting outside the hospital gates each afternoon, and he carries her basket, and I gather makes himself extremely useful in finding the best stalls and the cheapest prices. He seems to have a way with the Arab shopkeepers, you know what I mean? And afterwards he escorts her back again, carrying her parcels. My husband has nicknamed him “Ellen’s poodle”, but I’m afraid he isn’t what you would call house-trained. She asked him in for tea one afternoon – I gather he was extremely reluctant, and really she should have known better – and I was glad, I can tell you, that there was no one else on the verandah. It was rather embarrassing – well, I found it impossible to make out what he said, for one thing, and he seemed quite unaccustomed to afternoon tea, poor man. Yes, he is rather rough.’

‘Just as well, really,’ I found myself saying. ‘It has its uses, doesn’t it?’

‘You mean – oh, rescuing Ellen. Yes,’ she laughed a little doubtfully, ‘I suppose so. Oh, he seems to make himself useful, so I don’t mind – as long as she doesn’t invite him to our next cocktail party. That would be a little too much. You will be coming, Mr MacNeill, won’t you? – Saturday, at seven.’