The Complete McAuslan (74 page)

It was almost exactly thirty years to the day after I left the Army that I found myself in London
en route
for Yugoslavia, where I was to work on a film. Thirty years away from the regiment, in which time I had married, had children, emigrated, come back, worked my way from junior reporter to (briefly) the editor’s chair of a great newspaper, retired from journalism, and written several books. The latest one had just come out, and before catching my plane I was to attend a signing session at Hatchards of Piccadilly.

Signing sessions are ordeals. In theory, you stand in the bookshop, and the eager public, advised beforehand that you will be there in person (wow!), flock in to buy autographed copies. In practice, you can stand all day grinning inanely behind a pile of your latest brainchild, and the only approach you get is from an old lady who thinks you’re a shop assistant and wants to buy
The Beverly Hills Diet
. (This happens to all authors except the real blockbusters, and celebrities of sport and show business.)

Hatchards, fortunately, is different; being at the heart of the most literate metropolis on earth it is heaven-made for signing sessions – if you can’t sell your book there, it’s time to climb back on your truck. So it was with some relief that I arrived to find a modest queue forming to have their copies signed, and I was inscribing away gratefully and only wishing that my name was a more manageable length, like Ben Jonson or Nat Gould, when I became aware that the next customer in line was presenting for signature not my new novel but two battered copies of
The General Danced at Dawn and McAuslan in the Rough
. He was a tall, erect, very elderly gentleman in immaculate tweeds and cap, leaning on a ram’s horn walking-stick and looking at me like a grimly amused Aubrey Smith. I must have gaped at him for a good five seconds before I recognised him as the Colonel whom I had described in those two books (and have described again in this one). I hadn’t even heard of him since 1947, and suddenly there he was, large as life, looking nothing like the 80 that he must have been.

’Stick your John Hancock on those, will you?’ he growled amiably. ’No, carry on – we’ll say hullo later, when you’ve dealt with the rest of your public. You’ve put on weight,’ he added as I scribbled obediently – and I won’t swear I wasn’t doing it with my heels together, muttering ’Yes, sir, of course, sir,’ for he was every bit as imposing and formidable, even in mufti and long retirement, as he’d been in North Africa. Now he was taking up the books with a drawled ’Obliged t’you’, and limping stiffly away to seat himself at the side of the shop, filling his pipe and watching me from under shaggy eyebrows with what looked like sardonic satisfaction.

I went on signing like a man in an anxious dream. It’s strange ― when you write a book and put a real person into it, you don’t seriously consider the possibility that he’ll actually
read
it – at least, I hadn’t, idiot that I’d been. And now he was sitting not ten feet away, the same leathery grizzled ramrod with the piercing eye and aquiline profile, and obviously he’d read the damned things, and couldn’t have failed to recognise himself . . . oh, my God, what had I said about him? With dismay I recalled that I’d described him as ‘tall and bald and moustached and looking like a vulture’. Feeling sick, I shot a sidelong glance at him – well, it was true. He still did, and a fat consolation that was. Wait, though, I’d been pretty fair about his character, hadn’t I? Let’s see . . . I’d said he was wise, and just, and experienced and tough (but considerate), and respected . . . oh, lord, had I said ‘wise’ or ‘crafty’? In growing panic I scribbled on, and realised that the lady whose book I’d just signed was looking at it, and then at me, with a glassy expression.

‘Thank you so much. I do hope you enjoy it,’ I said, beaming professionally. She gave an uneasy smile and held out the book.

‘I think there’s some mistake, isn’t there?’ she faltered.

I couldn’t see one. ‘With all good wishes, George MacDonald Vulture’, was what I’d written, and then sanity returned and I wrenched it from her, babbling apologies, and signed a fresh copy. She hurried away, glancing back nervously, and I went on signing, trying to take a grip and telling myself that he couldn’t have taken offence, or he wouldn’t be here, would he?

Well, of course he hadn’t. I knew that – I’d always known it, or I’d never have set typewriter to paper in the first place about him and the regiment and McAuslan and the Adjutant and Wee Wullie and the Dancing General and all the rest of them. I had done it out of affection and pride, and to preserve memories that I loved. Not strict fact, of course, but by no means fiction, either – many true incidents and characters, as well as adaptations and shapings and amalgams and inventions and disguises, but always doing my best to keep the background detail as accurate as I could, and to be faithful to the spirit of that time and those people. And because newspaper training teaches you that truth is either the whole truth or nothing, it had had to be described as fiction. Hence that preface.

Once or twice, over the years, I had regretted the blanket quality of that disclaimer – as, for example, when readers and reviewers obviously regarded as complete invention some story in the books which was 90 per cent stark truth. But there was nothing to be done about it – until that day, after the signing session, when the Colonel and I finally got together, with effusion on my side and paternal tolerance on his, and repaired to the deserted bar of a West End hotel, where we hit the Glenfiddich together, and as we talked it gradually came to me that the disclaiming preface I had written for the first two books wouldn’t do for a third one, if I ever wrote it – which I have now done. I can’t reword it, because there is no satisfactory way of defining the misty margins where truth and fiction mingle. The best thing is to report as accurately as I can what he said that afternoon.

We talked and laughed and reminisced, and to my boundless delight he leafed through the books, commenting and quoting with that ironic little grin that I remembered so well; he seemed genuinely pleased with them, and what with happiness and the single malt I forgot all about the plane I was supposed to be catching, and just sat there content, studying the lined brown face and hooded bright eyes, and listening to the clipped Edwardian drawl of three generations ago. At last he said:

‘I’ve only one bone to pick with you, young fella.’ He flipped open
The General Danced at Dawn
and nailed the preface with a gnarled forefinger. ’Yes, there it is. What the devil d’you mean by saying “The Highland battalion in this book never existed”?’ He sat back, pipe clamped between his teeth, and fixed me with a frosty grey eye. ‘You know perfectly well it existed. You were in it, weren’t you? I commanded the dam’ thing, I ought to know – ’

’Yes, sir, I know – but I can’t pretend that
all
the things in the stories actually happened . . . not in our battalion, anyway ―’

‘And here again,’ he went on, ignoring me. ‘This next phrase, or clause, or whatever you call it: “inasmuch as the people in the stories are fictitious”. That’s rot. In fact, I’m not sure it isn’t libellous rot. Am I a fiction?’ He sat upright, regarding me sternly over his pipe, looking extremely factual. ‘Are you? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that McAuslan never existed? I’m dam’ sure you can’t – because he did.’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t his real name – ’

‘Of course it wasn’t. His real name was Mac—.’ He grinned triumphantly. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, my God,’ I said. ‘Yes, it was. D’you know, sir, you’re the only person who’s ever identified him – ’

‘You surprise me. I’d have thought that anyone who’d ever seen the brute closer than half a mile would have recognised him in the book at once.’

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘he’s slightly composite. I mean, the character in the book is 90 per cent Mac—, but there’s a bit of another chap in him as well.’

‘Quite so. Private J—, of C Company. Sandy-haired chap, with a slight squint, shirt-tail kept coming out.’

I stared at the man in disbelief. ‘How on earth did you know that?’

‘Your trouble,’ said the Colonel patiently, ‘is that you think no one else in the battalion ever noticed anything. It was perfectly obvious – whenever you had McAuslan doing something that wasn’t characteristic of Mac—, I thought: “He’s got that wrong. That’s not like Mac— at all. Who is it?” And then I remembered J—, and realised that you’d tacked a little of him into the character. Sometimes you changed people over altogether. Take the second-in-command . . . the man you’ve made the second-in-command was actually in our first battalion, and you never met him till we got back to Edinburgh, isn’t that so?’ He smiled at me knowingly, and took a smug sip of Glenfiddich.

‘Yes, his real name was R—. That’s the fellow. You’re an unscrupulous young devil, aren’t you?’ He leafed over a few pages. ‘Ah, yes, Wee Wullie – why did you call him that? You couldn’t hope to disguise the real man. Not from anyone who knew him.’

‘Law of libel – and a bit of delicacy,’ I explained. ‘After all, he’s a pretty rough diamond, as I’ve described him.’

‘Well, so he was, wasn’t he? And he comes out pretty well, in your story.’ He studied his glass for a long moment. ‘No more heroic than he really was in fact, though. You’ll have to tell the true story some day, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I will.’

‘See that you do.’ He picked up the book again, chuckled, frowned, and laid it down. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t have said the battalion didn’t exist, or that the people were fictitious, or given the impression that the stories were made up – ’

‘Well, they’re a mixture – a lot of fact and a bit of fiction. The trouble is, the bits people think are fictitious – ’

‘Are usually the truest bits of the lot. I know. The Palestine train, and the football team in Malta, eh? And the haunted fort, and the one-hundred-and-twenty-eightsome reel?’

‘Well, there’s a bit of exaggeration here and there – and I
have
said that I’ve used my imagination – ’

‘As if you ever had any! Mark you – you’ve certainly used it in one direction.’ He made a performance of filling his pipe, grumbling to himself and looking across the room. ‘You’ve been far too dam’ kind to that old Colonel,’ he said gruffly.

It was my turn to study my glass. ‘Not half as kind as he was to me,’ I said.

We finished the bottle, and in an alcoholic haze I glanced at my watch and realised I had a bare forty minutes to get to Heathrow for my flight to Zagreb.

‘Yugoslavia?’ said the Colonel. ‘What the devil are you going there for? Ghastly place – nothing but mountains and Bolshevik bandits.’

I explained that I was going out to write a film script – or part of a script. Another writer had done the original, but there had been cast changes and various alterations were wanted, including a new ending.

‘Most films are tripe,’ said the Colonel firmly. ‘
Bambi
wasn’t bad, though. What’s this one about?’

‘Our special service people in the war . . . blowing up a bridge to stop a German advance. Partisans and all that.’

‘Sounds all right,’ admitted the Colonel. ‘Who’s making it – our people or the Yanks?’

‘They’re American producers, I believe.’

‘Well, for God’s sake don’t let them have our chaps going about shouting “
On
the double!” and “Left face!” and saluting with their hats off. Damned nonsense!’

I dropped him off near his home in Chelsea, and the last I ever saw of him was the tall spare figure in tweeds leaning on his stick and throwing me a salute which I returned (without a hat on) as the taxi sped away. For the next year or two we exchanged Christmas cards, and now and then I heard odd scraps of gossip about him. He’d been on holiday in the Middle East, in a country where some crisis had blown up all of a sudden, and British nationals had had to be evacuated quickly ― he’d taken charge, quite unofficially, of the evacuation, and everyone had got out safely. Another time, he’d visited our battalion in Northern Ireland, going out with a street patrol at night, just to get the feel of things, an octogenarian in a flak-jacket.

And then one morning I got a phone call to say that he had died, in Erskine Hospital above the Clyde, where old Scottish soldiers go. And because he was, as fairly as I could depict him, the Colonel of these stories, I inscribe this book to his memory, with gratitude and affection, and no qualms whatever about identification:

Lieutenant-Colonel R. G. (Reggie) Lees
2nd Battalion, Gordon Highlanders
‘Ninety-twa, no’ deid yet’—

1

ile = oil (castor oil).

2

The Pioneer was a legendary hotel in Bombay during the last war where, it was said, deserters from the forces in India could find a clandestine passage back to Britain, being smuggled out on homeward-bound ships. Finlayson Green is a pleasant, tree-shaded sward near the Singapore waterfront; it used to be said that if a deserter loitered there long enough, furtive little Chinese would appear and offer to arrange his passage to Australia.

3

Sir Harry Aubrey de Vere Maclean (1848-1920), joined the Army in 1869, fought against Fenian raiders in Canada, and in 1877 entered the service of Sultan Mulai Hassan of Morocco as army instructor. In an adventurous career lasting more than thirty years ‘Kaid Maclean’ became something of a North African legend: he was the trusted adviser of the Sultan and his successor, campaigned against rebel tribes, survived court intrigues, journeyed throughout Morocco and visited the forbidden city of Tafilelt, and was once kidnapped (at the second attempt) and held to ransom by insurgents. Although unswervingly loyal to his employer, he was recognised as an unofficial British agent, and was created K.C.M.G. when he attended King Edward VII’s coronation as one of the Moroccan delegation. Maclean was a genial, popular leader although, as his biographer remarks, ‘being of powerful physique he was able to deal summarily with insubordinate individuals’. He was an enthusiastic piper who also played the piano, guitar, and accordion. (See the
Dictionary of National Biography.
)