The Sheik and the Dustbin

The self-imposed task of darning McGilvray’s socks was a small price to pay for all of that. Mind you, I could have done without it; it was a piece of nonsense, really … perhaps when I came back off leave I’d find another batman. Yes, definitely.

It was a whole month’s leave, what they called L.I.A.P., meaning leave in advance of Python, which was the codeword for demobilisation. I qualified because, having been in the ranks in India, I’d been overseas longer than most of the subalterns; consequently I found myself barraged with requests to go and see their families. This was a phenomenon of the time which may be hard to understand in these days of instant world travel - anyone going home was expected to visit his comrades’ parents, just so that they could hear about their boy from someone who’d actually been with him. Letters weren’t the same as being able to talk to and touch someone who’d been with Jack or Billy; it was a great reassurance in those days.

So, apart from a commission to buy the Colonel half a dozen of his favourite Lovat pipes (“and don’t let them fob you off with any damned Bulldogs or patent puffers, d’you hear?”) I had four or five addresses to call at in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. That was after I had undergone the extraordinary experience of “coming home from the war”, which must differ from person to person, I suppose, but is like nothing else in life. For this young soldier, unmarried and unattached, it was a going home to parents, a wonderful elated reunion full of laughter and babbling and maternal tears, and aunts exclaiming, and father shaking his head and grinning with satisfaction before going through to his surgery, bursting quietly with the news for his patients, and my MacNeill grandmother, ninety-three years old, bright-eyed and laughing softly in Gaelic as she preened herself in the Arab shawl I had brought her. (I wonder if she remembered my MacDonald grandmother’s remark to her as they listened together to Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939: “Well, Mrs MacNeill, the men will be going away again.” Only a Highland matriarch would put it quite like that. If my MacNeill grandmother did remember, she was probably reflecting that now the last of the men was home; the first ones she had seen returning, as a little girl, had been from the Crimea.)

It was very happy, but it was strange. They looked the same to me, of course, but now and then I realised that they were recognising the boy of 18 whom they remembered, in this much bigger, sunburned young man of 21. That’s an odd feeling. So is standing alone in the quiet of your room, just as you remember it but a little smaller, staring at each familiar thing of childhood and thinking: that day of the Sittang ambush … that terrible slow-motion moment at Kinde Wood when the section went down around you in the cross-fire … that night when the Japs came up the Yindaw road, the little ungainly figures in the light of the burning trucks, passing by only a few yards away … that hectic slashing mêlée at the bunkers under the little gold pagoda where L—bought his lot and J—had his hat shot off and the ground was dark and wet with blood - while all that was happening, a world and a lifetime away, this was here: the quiet room, just as it had always been, just as it is now. The porcupine-quill inkstand that the old man brought home from East Africa, the copy of Just William with its torn spine, the bail you broke with your fast ball against Transitus (it must have been cheap wood), the ink-stain low down on the wallpaper that you made (quite deliberately) when you were eight… Nothing changed, except you. Never call yourself unlucky again.

I couldn’t sleep in bed that night. I did something I hadn’t done since Burma, except on a few night exercises: I went out into the garden with a blanket and rolled up under a bush. God knows why. It wasn’t affectation -1 took good care that no one knew - nor was it sheer necessity, nor mere silliness in the exuberance of homecoming. At the time I felt it was a sort of gesture of thanksgiving, and only much later did I realise it was probably a reluctance to “come home” to a life that I knew there could be no return to, now. Anyway, I didn’t sleep a bloody wink.

After just a few days at home (which was in Northern England) I took off for Scotland. My excuse was that I had to make the visits I had promised, but the truth was I was restless and impatient. Three years of adventure - because there’s no other word for that kaleidoscope of travel and warfare and excitement and change in strange lands among weird exotic peoples - had done its work, and once the elation of just being home, so long dreamed of, had passed, there was the anticlimax, the desire to be off and doing again. It was no big psychological deal of the kind you see in movies; I wasn’t battle-happy, or “mentally scarred”, or hung up with guilt, nor did patrols of miniature Japanese brew up under my bed (as happened to one of my section whenever we came out of the line: we used to tell him to take his kukhri to them, and when he had done so to his satisfaction, swearing and carving the air, we all went back to sleep again, him included). It was just that my life was now outside that home of boyhood, and I would never settle there again. Of course no word of this was said, but I’m sure my parents knew. Parents usually do.

I was nearly two weeks in Scotland, staying at small hotels and making my afternoon calls on families who had been forewarned of my coming; it was a succession of front-rooms and drawing-rooms, with the best tea-service and sandwiches and such extravagance of scones and home-made cakes as rationing allowed (I had to remind myself to go easy on the sugar, or I would have cleaned them out), while I was cross-examined about Drew or Angus or Gordon, and photographs of the poor perishers were trotted out which would have curled their toes under, and quiet aunts listened rapt in the background, and younger brothers and sisters regarded me with giggling awe. They were such nice folk, kind, proper, hanging on every word about their sons, tired after the war, touchingly glad that I had come to see them. It was fascinating, too, to compare the parents with the young men I knew, to discover that the dashing and ribald Lieutenant Grant was the son of a family so douce that they said grace even before afternoon tea; that the parents of the urbane Captain D—, who had put him through Merchiston and Oxford, lived in a tiny top-floor flat in Colinton; and that Second Lieutenant Hunter, a pimply youth with protruding teeth, had a sister who was a dead ringer for Linda Darnell (and whose R. A.F. fiancé stuck to her like glue all through tea).

But the most interesting calls were the last two. The first was to a blackened tenement in Glasgow’s East End, where McGilvray’s widowed mother lived with his invalid great-uncle, on the third floor above a mouldering close with peeling walls, urchins screaming on the stairs, and the green tramcars clanging by. Inside, the flat was bright and neat and cosy, with gleaming brass, a kettle singing on the open black-leaded grate, an old-fashioned alcove bed, and such a tea on the table as I had not seen yet, with gingerbread and Lyle’s golden syrup. Mrs McGilvray was a quick, anxious wee Glasgow body, scurrying with the tea-pot while Uncle chuckled and made sly jokes at her; he was a small wheezy comedian with a waxed moustache and a merry eye, dressed in his best blue serge with a flower in his buttonhole and a gold watch-chain across his portly middle; he half-rose to greet me, leaning on a stick and gasping cheerfully, called me “l’tenant”, informed me that he had been in the H.L.I, in the first war, and wha’ shot the cheese, hey? (This is a famous joke against my regiment.) When he had subsided, wiping his eye and chuckling “Ma Goad, ma Goad”, Mrs McGilvray questioned me nervously across the tea-cups: was Charlie well? Was Charlie behaving himself? Was Charlie giving me any bother? Was Charlie saving his pay or squandering it on drink, cards, and loose women? (This was actually a series of questions artfully disguised, but that was their purport.) Was Charlie attending Church? Was he taking care? Were his pals nice boys?

“In Goad’s name, wumman,” cried Uncle, “let the man get his tea! Yattety-yattety-yattety! Cherlie’s fine! Thur naethin’ wrang wi’ him. Sure that’s right, L’tenant?”

“He’s fine,” I said, “he’s a great lad.”

“There y’are! Whit am Ah aye tellin’ ye? The boy’s fine!”

“Aye, well,” said Mrs McGilvray, looking down at her cup. “I aye worry aboot him.”

“Ach, women!” cried Uncle, winking at me. “Aye on aboot their weans. See yersel’ anither potato scone, L’tenant. Ma Goad, ma Goad.”

“Does he …” Mrs McGilvray hesitated, “does he … do his work well? I mean … looking after you, Mr MacNeill?”

“Oh, indeed he does. I think I’m very lucky.”

“Ah’d sooner hae a cairter lookin’ efter me!” wheezed Uncle. “Heh-heh! Aye, or a caur conductor! Ma Goad, ma Goad.’

“Wheesht, Uncle! Whit’ll Mr MacNeill think?”

“He’ll think yer an auld blether, gaun on aboot Cherlie! The boy’s no’ a bairn ony langer, sure’n he’s no’. He’s a grown man.” He glinted at me. “Sure that’s right? Here … will ye tak’ a wee dram, L’tenant? Ach, wheesht, wumman - can Ah no’ gie the man a right drink, then? His tongue’ll be hingin’ oot!” At his insistence she produced a decanter, shaking her head, apologising, while he cried to gie the man a decent dram, no’ just dirty his gless. He beamed on me.

“Here’s tae us! Ninety-Twa, no’ deid yet!”

“Whisky at tea-time - whit’ll Mr MacNeill think o’ ye?” wondered his niece, half-smiling.

“He’ll no’ think the worse o’ me for gie’n him a wee dram tae the Ninety-Twa,” said Uncle comfortably. He raised his glass again. “An’ tae the Bantam’s, hey, L’tenant? Aye, them’s the wee boys! Ma Goad, ma Goad …”

Mrs McGilvray saw me to the door when I left, Uncle crying after me no’ tae shoot ony cheeses gaun doon the stair. When I had thanked her she said:

“I wonder … Charlie doesnae write very often. D’you think …?”

“He’ll write every week,” I assured her. “He’s a great lad, Mrs McGilvray. You’re very lucky.”

“Well,” she said, clasping her hands, “he’s always been right enough. I’m sure you‘ll look after him.” We shook hands and she pecked me quickly on the cheek. “Take care, laddie.”

Uncle’s hoarse chuckle sounded from the inner room. “Come ben, wumman! Whit’ll the neebors say, you hingin’ aboot the stairheid wi’ sojers!’

She gave me a despairing look and retreated, and I went down the stairs, stepping over the children and reflecting that I was certainly not going to be able to change my batman now.

The final visit was to MacKenzie’s people, who lived in a fifteenth-century castle-cum-mansion in Perthshire, a striking piece of Gothic luxury in beautiful parkland with a drive a mile long through banks of cultivated heather; it contained its own salmon river, a fortune in standing timber, and a battalion of retainers who exercised dogs, strolled about with shotguns, and manicured the rhododendrons. Sir Gavin MacKenzie was his son thirty years on, tall, commanding, and with a handshake like a mangle; the red had apparently seeped from his hair into his cheeks, but that was the only difference. In manner he was cordial and abrupt, a genuine John Buchan Scottish aristo - which is to say that he was more English than any Englishman could ever hope to be. If you doubt that, just consider such typical “Englishmen” as Harold Macmillan, David Niven, Alec Douglas-Home, Jack Buchanan, Stewart Granger, and Charles II.

This was the only visit on which I actually stayed on the premises overnight. We dined at a long candlelit table in a large and clammy hall with age-blackened panelling covered with crossed broadswords, targes, and flintlocks, with silent servitors emerging occasionally from the gloom to refuel us. At one end sat Sir Gavin in a dinner jacket and appalling MacKenzie tartan trews cut on the diagonal; at the other, Lady MacKenzie, an intense woman with a staccato delivery who chain-smoked throughout the meal. From time to time she and her husband addressed each other in the manner of people who have met only recently; it was hard to believe that they knew each other well enough to be have begotten not only their son but a daughter, seated opposite me, a plain, lumpy sixteen-year-old with the magnificent MacKenzie hair, flaming red and hanging to her waist. The only other diner was a pale, elderly man with an eyeglass whose name I didn’t catch - in fact, looking back, I’m not sure he was there at all, since he never spoke and no one addressed him. He drank most of a bottle of Laphroaig during the meal, and took it with him when the ladies withdrew, leaving old man MacKenzie and me to riot over the port.

Coming on the evening of the day I had spent with the McGilvrays, it was an odd contrast. Lady MacKenzie had chattered non-stop about her son, but without asking any questions, and his sister had not, I think, referred to him at all, but since she had the finishing-school habit of talking very quickly to her armpit it was difficult to be sure. Sir Gavin had spoken only of the Labour Government. Now, when we were alone, he demanded to know why, in my opinion, Kenny had not joined the Scots Guards, in which he, Sir Gavin, had held an exalted position. Why had he chosen a Highland regiment? It was extraordinary, when he could have been in the Brigade; Sir Gavin couldn’t understand it.

I said, trying not to smile, that it was possible some people might prefer a Highland regiment, and Sir Gavin said, yes, he knew that, but it wasn’t the point. Why young Kenneth? It seemed very odd to him, when the family had always been in the Brigade, and he could have kept an eye on the boy - “I mean, I don’t know your Colonel - what’s his name? No, don’t know him. Good man, is he?”

“They don’t come any better,” I said. It seemed fairly obvious to me why young Kenneth, a firebrand and a maverick, had chosen not to be in father’s regiment, but that could not be said. Sir Gavin looked glum, and said he didn’t know anything about Highland regiments - fine reputation, of course, but he didn’t know how they were, d’you see what I mean? With the Guards, you knew where you were. Life for a young officer was cut and dried … Highland regiment, he wasn’t so sure. Suddenly he asked:

“Is he a good officer?”

“Kenny? Yes. His Jocks like him.”

“His what?”

“His Jocks-his men.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “What about your Colonel?”

“I’m sure he thinks Kenny’s a good officer.” Indeed, Sir Gavin didn’t know about Highland regiments, where the opinion of the men is the ultimate test, and every colonel knows it. Sir Gavin chewed his cigar and then said:

“You were a ranker, weren’t you? Very well - in Burma, would you have … accepted Kenneth as your platoon commander?”

I mentally compared Kenny with the brisk young man who’d once challenged me to a spelling bee and caught me out over “inadmissible”, and who’d died in a bunker entrance the next day. A good subaltern, but no better than MacKenzie.

“Yes,” I said. “Kenny would have done.”

“You think so?” he said, and suddenly I realised he was worried about his son. In the Guards, he could have served with him in spirit, so to speak - but he didn’t know how Highland regiments were, he’d said. Did the boy fit into that almost alien background? Was he a good officer? Like Mrs McGilvray, he aye worried about him, if for a different reason. So it seemed sensible to start talking about Kenny, describing how he got on in the regiment, how he and his platoon sergeant, McCaw, the Communist Clydesider, formed a disciplinary alliance that was a battalion byword, recalling incidents in which Kenny had figured, our own companionship, things like that, no doubt babbling a bit, while Sir Gavin listened, and kept the decanter going, now and then asking a question, finally sitting in silence for a while, and then saying:

“Well, I’m glad he’s all right. Thank you.”

It was two in the morning when we finally rose, port-bloated and drowsy - he must have been partially kettled, for he insisted on a frame of snooker with accompanying brandies before we parted for the night. “John’ll look after you,” he said, hiccoughing courteously, and I was aware of a dim sober figure at the foot of the massive staircase, waiting to conduct me to my room - which brings me back, after this digression of homecoming, to where I was in the first place.

John was a footman, the only one I have ever encountered outside the pages of Georgette Heyer and Wodehouse, and he would have fitted into them perfectly, along with the rest of the MacKenzie ménage. No doubt I was a trifle woozy with tiredness and Croft’s Old Original, but I have no impression that I had to stir so much as a finger in order to get into bed. His shadow flitted about me, my clothes vanished, towel and soap and warm water swam into my ken, followed by pyjamas and a cup of some bland liquid, and then I was between the sheets and all was dark contentment. When I woke two hours later there was a tray at the bedside with various mineral waters, biscuits, and a glass of milk, all under a dim night-light. I think the milk had been spiked, for the first two hours after waking next morning passed in a beatific haze; I seem to remember curtains being drawn and a cup of tea appearing, and then I was borne up gently into a sitting position and presently subsided, shaven, while a voice murmured that my bath had been drawn - not filled or running, you understand, but drawn. At that point he vanished, and when I emerged from the bathroom, more or less awake, there was a breakfast tray on the window table, with porridge and Arbroath smokies and ham and eggs and such morning rolls as God’s Own Prophet eats only in Glasgow bakeries; the Scotsman and the Bulletin lay beside it (not that I was fit for more than the Scottykin comic strip), my clothes were laid out, pressed, brushed, and beautiful, my shoes a-gleam, and even my cap badge and sporran chains had been polished.

This, it slowly dawned on me, was living, and it took an immense effort to decline the MacKenzies’ invitation to stay on, but I suspected that after a few days of John’s attention I would have forgotten how to tie my shoe-laces and wave bye-bye. As I travelled south again, and later on the flight to Cairo, I had daydreams in which the press-gang had been reintroduced, and John had been crimped into my personal service; it would give me a new outlook on life, and I would rise effortlessly to general rank and a knighthood, possibly even C.I.G.S., for nothing less was conceivable with that mysterious retainer sorting me out; I would have to live up to the ambience he created. At that point the dreaming stopped, as I realised that I simply wasn’t made for that kind of destiny, or for the ministrations of people like John.

This was driven home with a vengeance in Benghazi, of all unlikely places, where I had to spend three days between flights on the way back to the battalion. I had just entered the room allotted me in the transit camp when there was a clump of martial feet on the verandah, and into the doorway wheeled a gigantic German prisoner-of-war. From the crown of his blond shaving-brush skull to his massive ammunition boots and rolled socks must have been a cool six and a half feet; in between he wore only tiny khaki shorts and a shirt which appeared to have been starched with concrete. He crashed to attention, stared at the wall, and shouted:

“Saar, Ai em yewer betmen. Mai nem is Hans. Pliz permit thet Ai unpeck yewer kit.”

My immediate reaction was: how the hell did we ever beat this lot? For what I was looking at was one of Frederick William’s Prussian giants, the picture of a Panzer Grenadier, the perfect military automaton. He was, I learned later, captured Afrika Korps, waiting to be repatriated and meanwhile employed to attend transients like myself. When I had recovered and told him to carry on, he stamped again, ducked his head sharply, and went at my valise like a great clockwork doll, unpacking and stowing with a precision that was not quite human; it was a relief to see that there wasn’t a knob on the side of his neck.

It was my first encounter with the German military, and I didn’t mind if it was the last. In his heel-clicking way he was as perfect a servant as John had been, for while John had worked his miracles without actually being there, apparently, and never obtruding his personality, Hans succeeded by having no personality at all. It was like having a machine about the place, bringing tea by numbers; you could almost hear the whirr and click with every action. In fact, he was a robot-genie, with the gift of sudden shattering appearance; he would be out on the verandah, standing at ease, and if I so much as coughed he would be quivering in the doorway shouting “Saar!”, ready to fetch me a box of matches or march on Moscow. I began to understand Frederick the Great and Hitler; given a couple of million Hanses at your beck and call, the temptation to say “Occupy Europe at once!” must be overpowering.

I say he had no personality, but I’m not so sure. In three days he never betrayed emotion, or even moved a facial muscle except to speak; if he had a thought beyond the next duty to be performed, you would never have known it. But on the last night, I had gone up to the mess in khaki drill, having left my kilt hanging by its waist-loops on the cupboard door. Coming back, I glanced in at my window, and there was Hans standing looking at the kilt with an expression I hadn’t seen before. It was a thoughtful, intense stare, with a lot of memory behind it; he moved forward and felt the material, traced his thumb-nail along one of the yellow threads, and then stepped back, contemplating it with his cropped head on one side. I may be wrong, but I believe that if ever a man was thinking, “Next time, you sons-of-bitches”, he was. I made a noise approaching the doorway, and when I went in he was turning down the bed, impassive as ever.

But whatever secret thoughts he may have had in his Teutonic depths, Hans, as a servant, was too much for me - just as the disembodied John had been. As I observed earlier, you have to be a Junker, or its social equivalent (with all that that implies) to be able to bear having the Johns and Hanses dance attendance on you; if you are just a gentleman for the working day, you must stick to your own kind.

I reached the battalion the following evening, asked the jeep driver to drop off my kit at my billet, and walked over to 12 Platoon barrack-room. They were there, loafing about, lying on their cots, exchanging the patter, some cleaning their kit, others preparing to go out on the town: the dapper Fletcher was combing his hair at a mirror, fox-trotting on the spot; Forbes, in singlet and shorts, was juggling a tennis ball on his instep; Riach was writing a letter (to the Wee Frees’ Grand Inquisitor, probably); Daft Bob Brown was sitting on his bed singing “Ah’ve got spurrs that jingle-jangle-jingle, so they doo-oo!” and at the far end Private McAuslan, clad à la mode in balmoral bonnet and a towel with which he had evidently been sweeping a chimney, was balanced precariously on his bed-end, swiping furiously at moths with his rifle-sling; from his hoarse vituperations I gather he blamed their intrusion on Sergeant Telfer, the Army Council, and the Labour Government of Mr Attlee. He and Sir Gavin MacKenzie should have got together.

One of the corporals saw me in the doorway and started to call the room to attention, but I flagged him down, and the platoon registered my appearance after their fashion.

“Aw-haw-hey, Wullie! The man’s back!”

“See, Ah told ye he hadnae gone absent.”

“Hiv a good leave, sur?”

“Way-ull! Back tae the Airmy again!”

“Whit did ye bring us frae Rothesay, sur?”

“Aye, it’ll be hell in the trenches the morn!” and so on with their keelie grins and weird slogans, and very reassuring it was. I responded in kind by bidding them a courteous good evening, looked forward to meeting them on rifle parade at eight and kit inspection at ten, and acknowledged their cries of protest and lamentation. McGilvray came forward with my Sam Browne in one hand and a polishing rag in the other.