Read Online Good Enough For Nelson by John Winton - Free Book Online

his finger bowl and eats his peas off his knife ...’
    ‘Have you ever actually done that?’
    ‘No, sir, to be honest, I can’t say I’ve ever tried.’
    ‘According to Mr Spicer, it’s bloody difficult.’
    ‘He should know, sir. But as I was saying, sir, one winter term you might find that nobody can play rugger. None of them ever heard of it. Yet the next summer, by sod’s law, you get half the London Scottish team. We also get lads who have run their father’s undertakers business for the last two years, or played three seasons in professional rep. as a spear-carrier, or someone who’s conducted guided tours to Katmandu. The old cannabis trail, he called it. You never know. We’ve got a bloke now who’s made his own hovercraft, speaks three languages and spends part of his leave working in a remedial home for handicapped children.’
    ‘Hell’s teeth, that sounds too good to be true. Who’s that?’
    ‘Chap called McAllester, sir.’
    ‘Ah.’ The Bodger now knew, from experience, that McAllester was bound to rise in the Navy. The main difficulty in the Service had always been that of getting oneself known, without actually getting one’s name in the papers. Here was a young man who had come twice to the Captain of the College’s attention before the Captain had been in the College half a dogwatch. Both occasions had been unschemed and unplanned. Luck was an essential quality for a successful naval officer, as The Bodger knew better than anybody.
    ‘The thing is, we get such a wide selection now, sir. The ordinary common-or-garden hewer of wood and drawer of water, your ordinary actual Dartmouth bloke, who used to join at thirteen in short trousers in your day and in long trousers at eighteen with me, he’s a very rare fish indeed now, sir. Very much in the minority. If you look at the composition of the divisions, you will see that besides the Gromboolians...’
    ‘What percentage are they, exactly?’
    ‘I don’t know precisely, sir. I could work it out, but offhand, and fairly accurately, I would say about one in ten.’
    ‘As much as that?’
    ‘Good God, sir, if the Gromboolian navies had their way it would be a hundred per cent! They love it. Lap it up. They queue up to send their bods here. But, of course, if you allowed the percentage to creep up above a certain figure then the very Dartmouth atmosphere they want and are paying for would disappear. Like a place that was all tourists and nobody living there, the very people that the tourists have paid to see. We’re training some of these officers to man ships we can’t afford ourselves now and operate gear we designed but haven’t the money to put in our own ships. I think it’s happening all over the Navy now, sir. In a way we’re now like somebody who has had to sell his own estate and can’t afford to keep up his own shoot, but goes on designing guns and training keepers and gun-dogs for other people who can still afford to shoot.’
    The Bodger was beginning to admire Isaiah Nine Smith’s fluency. This, he recognised, was a vital man. Ikey could be The Bodger’s hot line into the College’s moods.
    ‘But as I was saying, sir...’ Once again Isaiah Nine Smith came remorselessly back to his point. ‘If you look at any collection of OUTs out there, you’ll see the Gromboolians, but not only them, but padres and Royal Marines and upperyard men, or royal yard men as they call them now, supplementary list officers and schoolies and doctors and aircrew officers and failed aircrew officers who are trying to requalify for something else. We take everybody on now, sir, like Eskimo Nell. Then there are blokes who are just about to go to university and blokes who’ve just been to university, and blokes who are at university, coming here to do their training in their vacations. We already have the nursing officers doing their training and I’ve no doubt we shall all wake up one morning and find the place moving with Wrens. I think