two hours, twenty minutes.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Because the present record is two and a half hours.’
In the wardroom galley, the staff of cooks were opening cans of soup like men demented, their heads nodding together rhythmically, their hands a blur of rapid movement. Empty cans were rattling like spent cartridge-cases in a pile in a large bin. The number ‘29’ was chalked on a board beside the door. The chief cook was adding chalk marks to a row, one every few seconds. Jimmy exchanged a knowing nod with him.
‘That’s ‘how many cans six men managed to open in a minute yesterday,’ he told The Bodger. ‘They’re trying to go one better today.’
Outside the wardroom, The Bodger paused to look at an ornamental column, which stood as tall as man’s eye, with a dramatic arrangement of various flowers, leaves, grasses and creepers sprouting or hanging from it. Somebody had clearly been to a deal of trouble. Jimmy took out a card which had been hidden somewhere under the jungle of foliage. He showed The Bodger the number written on it, ‘42’.
‘That’s the number of different kinds of flower or plant used in the decoration,’ he explained. ‘The record is seventy-four, held by the wife of the last College padre but one. The other wives were convinced she was a witch, and grew henbane in her backyard at the full moon and all that.’
The Bodger stared again at the decorated pillar, aghast at the amount of toil and ambition and frustration it represented.
‘The College has these crazes occasionally,’ Jimmy was saying. ‘I expect they had them when you were last here. You’re never quite sure what form they’re going to take. Last term, it was bog paper. All the officers under training competed to see how much they could use. At a sitting, so to speak. Our College consumption went up by several thousand thousand per cent. We’re still getting hurt and baffled letters from Naval Stores about it. Apparently they’re going to have to grow a special forest up in Saskatchewan somewhere, just to keep up with the BRNC’s consumption of loo paper.’
They were walking along the corridor of the main building, when The Bodger heard a shriek of ‘Mind yer backs, please sir!’ behind him. He stood aside, just in time, as an electric floor-polishing machine hurtled past him, its motor wailing mournfully. An aged naval pensioner, in blue uniform and brass buttons, was running behind it, or rather being dragged along by it, with his white locks flying, his rheumy eye staring, and the sweat standing out on his venerable brow. He looked like the Ancient Mariner hijacked by a runaway speed-boat.
The Bodger had quite forgotten the Dartmouth corridors. They were very wide, and very shiny, and very long. They seemed to go on for ever, taking different levels on different floors, as though on different planes of existence, and their wooden decks were polished most mornings by flying squadrons of pensioners with polishers such as the one which had nearly run them down. The Bodger stared down the long, long, corridor in front of him. Running figures suddenly crossed it, at the far end. The sound of many clattering footsteps echoed back towards him. These corridors were a part of The Bodger’s own boyhood. At thirteen he had had to double along them many times a day, with the fear of being late for a parade, or a class, or a game, or a muster, for ever treading like a fiend on his heels.
The corridor bulkheads were almost entirely lined with photographs, the great majority of them the term photographs of Dartmouth cadets, dating back many years. There they were, all of them the Navy of the future in their own day and generation, standing in rows on the College steps, their young faces screwed up against the sun or braced against the winter wind above their stiff collars and white lanyards. In front were their instructors and divisional officers and chief petty officers, with the current Captain of the College