Читать книгу Old-Soldier Sahib - Frank Richards - Страница 5

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The old signaller, Mills and I were sent over to Jersey six weeks in advance, under the charge of a lance-corporal, to get the hang of the system of telegraphy in use there. For these six weeks we were attached to the Devons, who were stationed in the Fort at St. Helier’s with a detachment of about one hundred men at St. Peter’s, about six miles distant. I was sent to St. Peter’s, where, instead of the proper telegraph instrument I had expected, I found a peculiar apparatus which worked according to what was called the Whitehead system. It consisted of two clocks, one a sending and the other a receiving clock. The sender had little buttons all around the outside of it and on the dial was the alphabet from A to Z and the numbers from one to zero; when a button was pressed a needle swung to the letter or number marked. The receiver had no buttons, but the needle swung around similarly to the letters or figures of the message; after the completion of a word it came to rest at a mark between zero and letter A. Each station was linked up with telegraph wires, but these were smaller than the usual ones and the clocks had to be charged electrically now and again. Messages could be sent and received extraordinarily fast; the drawback was that a message could not be written down while it was being received, so that every word had to be memorized. After I had been at the job three months I could receive a message of forty or fifty words and write it down practically word for word, figures and all. I worked from nine in the morning to noon and then from two to four. At St. Peter’s I was nearly always finished by noon, as it was very rarely that an Officer was to be found in barracks during the afternoon. I had a bunk of my own near the Orderly Room and I could stay out all night if I wanted to, so long as I was back in Orderly Room the next morning by nine.

I had the good fortune to pick up with a girl in a village not far from St. Helier’s and we used to meet frequently all the months that I was in the island. There was no talk between us of marriage, as there was in the case of a number of our chaps who walked out with young ladies, preening themselves like peacocks beforehand. This was called square-pushing, a term which had its origin in the care that men took to get their knapsack to look properly square before parading in full order; but only one marriage resulted from all this effort, and then the man had to serve very nearly seven years in the East before he saw Jersey and his wife again. The people of St. Helier’s were extremely respectable and prosperous owing to the trade in new potatoes and early tomatoes (with cheap manure from the sea-weed on the coast) and the summer tourist trade; and there were remarkably few prostitutes in the town, not more than half a dozen at the most. One of them was a very handsome girl with plenty of money which she made out of the summer visitors. Her name was French Annie. She would often treat a soldier who was hard up to a drink, a thing that I have never seen happen elsewhere. Not a single man was admitted to hospital with venereal disease during all the time we were stationed on the island, and that also was a remarkable thing.

I was doing only one hour’s work a day; the rest I spent chiefly in reading. Although I detested school I had always been passionately fond of reading, and a Jersey Militia Officer who was attached to the Devons kindly lent me a number of novels, mostly historical ones, which was the sort I preferred. One thing that I had learned during my twelve months of soldiering was that the less work a man did in the Army, the more money he received—that is, if he was on a staff-job like the one I was on now. Because I was doing next to nothing I was paid sixpence a day extra. At the end of the month an Engineer sergeant would come up to St. Peter’s especially on purpose to reward me for my arduous work, and this fifteen shillings or fifteen-and-six always meant a good celebration for me in St. Helier’s. At St. Peter’s there was only a pub and a farm. Lily Langtry, the famous actress and friend to King Edward, lived close to Beaumont Station, which was the one I usually took to get into St. Helier’s by the small railway which ran along the sea-front of the Bay of St. Aubyn’s. Her house was not a large one but very pretty, and she was still a handsome and stately lady who had clearly been a dream of beauty when she was in the twenties. I got on excellently with the Devons and thought that Jersey was a grand place. It was almost a foreign country. A great many of the inhabitants were French-speaking and the island only recognized His Majesty as Duke of Normandy, not as King of England, which they regarded as a later and inferior title. There was no duty on spirits or tobacco; the dearest thing was beer, which was threepence a pint. I spent the happiest six months of my life in Jersey; it was just the same for me when the Royal Welch relieved the Devons, except that my last two months were spent in the Fort at St. Helier’s.

Perched very high on the Fort was a Government visual-signalling station: there were men posted there with powerful telescopes, always on the look-out for any foreign warships that came within range. Whenever they spotted a warship of any description (and they were always French that they spotted) they would write a message giving the ship’s name. The message was brought down to me to transmit to the Intelligence Department. Sometimes the messages were in cipher and they must have been important ones, because the cipher had to be repeated back to me to make sure that there was no mistake.

There was a kind of compulsory military service in the Channel Islands: every able-bodied male who had lived in Jersey a certain time had to join the Jersey Militia, which did about a month’s training every year. Our chaps and the militia took part that summer in a sham battle on a piece of ground called Gory Common. (Jersey is so well-cultivated that there is not much space there for military manœuvres.) I believe this battle had been arranged for the benefit of the aristocracy and well-to-do people of the island who were present in large numbers to witness it. It was a pukka comic-opera battle: thousands of blank cartridges were fired and the civilians cheered themselves hoarse when the charge was made. This was just about the time that the South African War came to an end. Peace was proclaimed on the last day of May 1902, and soon I had a letter from my Aunt to say that David had come safely through and was in the pink. Twelve months later, however, when I was abroad, news came that he had been invalided out of the Army with some complaint of the heart which had been brought on by the hardships of Mounted Infantry service on the veldt. He was granted the noble pension of tenpence a day for life. Later he married and removed from Blaina to Bedwas where he had a good job; he interested himself in local government work there and was soon elected a councillor, but the South African War had left its mark on him and he died before he was fifty, honoured and respected by all who knew him.

Several men had been trained as telegraph operators to take our places in case anything happened to us. I was very glad that this had been done when the word went round that a draft of one hundred and ninety men would be sent to India, as soon as the trooping season commenced, to reinforce the Second Battalion who were under orders to proceed there from Hong-Kong. My name was down for this draft and I went home on leave to Blaina. When I arrived there I found the people not nearly so interested in soldiers as they had been while the war was in progress. My Aunt and Uncle made me very welcome and if I had not changed so much during my short-service it would have been just like old times; though I missed my old buttie, who had moved down to the Rhondda. My cousin Evan was still working in the same pit as before. (He was still there when I returned after completing my service in India, and even when I returned after my four and a half years’ service in the Great War. In fact, he worked there for twenty-five years, until 1921, when the colliery failed to reopen after the Strike. Then he moved to Birmingham. Evan has had eight children and has been a grandfather for a few years: it is remarkable how different his life has turned out from mine, considering how close together we were as boys. Evan is also a staunch Labour man.) My Aunt was always a great believer in the grub-stakes, and on the day I returned to duty she packed up enough of sandwiches for my train journey to have appeased the appetites of a dozen men. Her final advice to me was to have faith in God; my Uncle’s was to have faith in myself and keep away from the damned women, who were the ruin of many a young man who went out to India.

During my leave the Royal Welch details left Jersey for Lichfield in Staffordshire, where I rejoined them. I well remember the night before the draft left for Southampton: it was a wild one. Most of the draft started mafficking, as we called it then, or making whoopee as the same business is called now. All the furniture in the Canteen suffered severely. There was fighting through and through and armed pickets were called out to restore order. We had a fine display of black eyes and cocked lips to show the following morning, but everybody seemed in good spirits when we marched to the railway station, and one man, who had the blackest eye of any, said that he had spent the most enjoyable evening and night of his life. Later, we had to pay for the damage that had been done in barracks: each man of the draft was stopped twelve shillings out of his accounts. There were many groans and curses over this, from guilty and innocent alike: there was not £100 worth of furniture to smash in the whole Canteen, and that is counting in the old piano which was so old and out of tune that it was next to impossible even to knock Pop goes the Weasel out of it. No doubt the Canteen was provided with a new piano out of the damages that were paid by us in distant India, and no doubt there were some who had a good drink with the surplus money after the furniture had been repaired.

We embarked at Southampton on a troop-ship, the name of which I have forgotten. There were close on two thousand troops on board and we reached Bombay towards the middle of November after a voyage of twenty-one days. I had never been on a long sea voyage before and I enjoyed every day of this one. I did not suffer with sea-sickness as many did: in fact I have never been sea-sick in the whole of my life. The food was good and the ship’s bakers, who provided us with excellent bread, made money too by selling us penny buns. There were also sailors who came around during the day with large tins of sherbert and pails of fresh water; they charged a penny for a small tumbler of water with a teaspoonful of sherbert in it. This drink was called a Bombay fizzer. During the last ten days of the voyage they did an excellent trade with their fizzers and if they did not make a daily profit of thirty shillings to two pounds apiece they considered that trade was pretty bad.

Each man drew a hammock every evening and returned it the following morning. The hammocks were slung on hooks below deck, but after we passed Gibraltar we were allowed to sleep on the hurricane-deck and the forecastle. Many of us took advantage of this permission and unless a storm was raging I always chose the upper deck, in preference to trying to sleep in the heat below deck. But I had to move very quickly in the early morning if I did not want the swabbers who were cleaning the decks to turn the hose on me and wash me into the scuppers. Each unit in turn found a guard, with many sentries posted both below and above decks. The only parade we did during the day was about an hour’s Swedish drill in the morning, but we occasionally paraded with lifebelts on for boat-drill. Most of the time was passed away in gambling. There were card-parties of Kitty-nap and Brag dotted here and there on the hurricane-deck and forecastle, but Under and Over, Crown and Anchor, and House were the most popular games. It was generally old sailors or ship’s stewards when they were off duty who worked the Crown and Anchor boards. Two of these stewards, father and son, used to relieve each other on the job.

In case anyone is interested in a description of Crown and Anchor I shall give one here. The requisites are a board or sheet, three dice and a dice-cup. The sheet can be easily made and anything will do for a cup, but a good set of dice costs about a guinea. The whole outfit can be stowed away in the corner of a man’s haversack. On each of the dice are six figures with corresponding highly coloured figures in six squares on the sheet. These are the figures with their nicknames:

Heart Transfixed	..	Puff and Dart
Diamond	..	Kimberley
Club	..	Shamrock
Spade	..	Grave-digger
Anchor	..	Mud-hook
Crown	..	Sergeant-major

The banker sits on the ground with legs wide apart and the sheet between them. The whole of his money is placed in two caps, one holding bank-notes, the other silver. He puts them quite close to him between his legs.

To attract players the banker shouts as follows: “Come on, come on, my lucky lads! Gather around the old man and see the game of Diddlum Buk. Here you are, my old sports, chuck it down thick and heavy. The more you put down, the more you pick up. You come here in rags and you drive away in a carriage and pair.” After everyone around the sheet has backed his fancy, the banker shakes the three dice in the cup, which he turns upside down on the sheet, the dice remaining covered. If, say, the diamond and the heart transfixed have been poorly backed, the banker, before lifting the cup to display the dice, will encourage the backers to lay a little more on them: this is to square up his book. He will say: “What about the old Kimberley and Puff and Dart, my lads? They’re the very two that should be backed. What wins the ladies’ hearts? Diamonds, my lads, diamonds. Now then, is there any more for any more? Have you all done? Well, up she comes—and—what did I tell you?—one lucky Kimberley, one Puff and Dart and the grand old Sergeant-major! I went down on my knees begging you to back two of the three but you wouldn’t listen to my advice. ... All paid, all weighed, and off we go again.”

Even money is paid for figures that come up singly; two to one when they come up on two dice, and three to one when they come up on all three. A backer can put his stake on as many figures as he likes. If an equal stake is laid on each figure and three different figures turn up, the banker has nothing to pay out. Some bankers put ten shillings or more on the centre of the sheet, to be won by the man who has the largest stake of the round on a figure that turns up on all three dice at the same time. This is done to incite men to lay a heavier stake on a figure than what they otherwise would. If this prize is won a similar amount is immediately put on the sheet again, the banker pretending that he is delighted that his customers are in luck. If more triplets turn up he stops giving money for nothing, but the odds are over two hundred to one against a triplet. A favourite system with backers who have plenty of money and are out to beat the banker is to back a certain figure and stick to it. They start with a small stake and double it every time they lose. If the original stake has been sixpence and the figure has not turned up for eleven rounds, over £50 will have to be staked on the twelfth bet; if it then turns up singly all that has been won is the original stake. To win any money with this system, doubles or triplets of the figure have to turn up at some time or other, and the odds against a double is eighteen to one each time. I have always considered this system a rotten one. The only time I ever won real money at this game I backed a different figure every time I made a bet; but as a system this is rotten too. I nearly always used it during my Army service, but with that single exception always rose up stony-broke at the finish. All the men I knew who worked a Crown and Anchor sheet were rolling in wealth; the odds were considerably in their favour and they had to be very unlucky to go broke.

The trooping season lasted six months and the old steward told a few of us one day that for years he and his son had been winning five hundred pounds or more in the course of each season. He also revealed that more money was won from the time-expired men coming home than from the recruits going out.

While I am on the subject of games of chance, I may as well explain Under and Over, and House. The requisites for Under and Over are two dice, a sheet and a cup. The dice are ordinary ones numbered from one to six. The sheet is divided into three squares; one of the outside ones is marked “Under” and the other “Over”; the centre square has the number seven marked on it. The banker’s remarks are similar to those of the Crown and Anchor banker’s, and the dice are shaken and covered in the same manner. If the dice when uncovered show that the number of pips, added together, is under seven, “Under” wins; if over, “Over” wins. If they add up to seven, the Lucky Old Seven, as it is called, wins. The banker pays even money on Under and on Over, but three to one on the Seven. This game was not so popular as Crown and Anchor, and before I left the service it was very rarely that I saw it played.

The requisites for a game of House are twenty-four cards, ninety small round wooden pips numbered from one to ninety and a small bag to shake them in; total cost about half-a-crown. The whole of this outfit also could be stowed away in a man’s haversack. There are three lines on each card, the majority having five numbers on each line; although similar numbers appear on some of the cards they are so arranged that not one single line is the same as another in the whole pack of cards. It takes two men to work a game of House: one calls out the numbers, the other collects the money and issues the cards. Before the first game begins it is generally decided between workers and players whether a penny or twopence shall be paid for each card on the games played. The first man to cover a single line on his card and to call out “House” is the winner. Out of every sixpence taken the workers deduct a penny for themselves. After the first game—which takes longer because of the players getting down and disputing together—the whole process of collecting the money, calling the numbers and covering a single line only takes four or five minutes. Pieces of bread, match-sticks or small stones are used for covering the numbers as they are called out.

Some workers I knew would not charge for the cards for the first game and gave eighteenpence out of their pockets to the winner—this was called a free house. Some would attract players by the power of their lungs and the quick way they called the numbers out. To draw a crowd they would shout: “Housee, housee, housee! House about and what about it? Roll up, my lucky lads and patronize the old firm! If you are lucky you may win enough for a good night’s booze, and enough, besides, to spend the livelong night with the most charming White Pros. in Bengal [or wherever it might be] so roll up and take a card!” The caller sits on his backside, legs straight out in front of him. He shakes the pips in the bag, draws out a handful and shouts: “Look on! Eyes on!” As he calls out the numbers he lays each pip on the ground in front of him, making nine rows, so that it will be easy to check the card that “House” has been called upon. If House is not called on the first handful he remarks: “Another dip in the old bag and nobody sweating.” “Been sweating a blasted week for one bloody number,” immediately reply several voices in chorus. When House is called the card is handed to the caller, who checks it with the pips on the ground, which he calls out in a loud voice. Finding it correct he hands the card back saying: “House correct, pay the man his money.” It was very rarely that a house was found not to be correct: it always occurred through the man innocently covering a number on his card which had not been called out. The number in dispute might be on the card of some other man who had been waiting for it to complete his line. Often before the caller had time to shout “House not correct” the majority of the men, thinking the game was over, had knocked all the pellets off their cards. The caller would then have to call every number that he had already called, over again; before doing so he would curse a little and invite his assistant to examine the man’s ears. The players would also curse and tell the man to report sick and have his bloody ear-holes syringed out.

Good callers always called the nicknames for the following numbers:

No. 1—Little Jimmy, or Kelly’s Eye.

No. 11—Legs Eleven. (The number resembles a pair of legs, and was given this extra syllable to distinguish it from Seven and avoid mistakes.)

No. 28—The Old Brags. (The nickname of the 1st Battalion of the Gloucester Regiment, the 28th Foot.)

No. 44—Open the Door.

No. 66—Clickety-click.

No. 90—Top of the House, or, Top of the Bleeding Bungalow.

One caller was so well versed in military history that as he called each number he would give the name or nickname of the regiment of the line that corresponded with it, from Number 1, the Royal Scots, or “Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard”, onwards. For example, Number 9 was the “Holy Boys”, the Norfolk Regiment, who once sold the Bibles given them by a pious old lady, before going overseas, to buy beer. Number 50 was the “Blind Half-Hundred” or “Dirty Half-Hundred”, the Royal West Kents. Number 57 was the “Diehards”, the Middlesex Regiment. Number 69, as I have already explained, was the “Ups and Downs”, the 2nd Welsh Regiment, who started as a mixed battalion of old crocks and young recruits, then fought for some time as marines, and at the finish, after nearly two hundred years of service, were officially converted into Welshmen. Number 23 was our own regiment, the “Old Flash and a Dash”.

During rests on the line of march I have often played this game for hours without getting up for anything. The game would sometimes continue all through the evening up to an hour before First Post, by candlelight. The last half-dozen games were always Full House games, played at fourpence a card: the players had to cover all three lines on their cards before they could call House. The workers considered that they had had a bad day if they did not make between thirty shillings and two pounds between them; but this would mean six or seven hours’ continuous play. There were always men waiting ready to take the place of players who had to drop out of the game. Although all gambling was strictly prohibited, even the most regimental of the N.C.O.s in the Second Battalion always winked an eye at it. Most of them were fond of a gamble themselves and on the line of march every one of them had a flutter now and then—with the exception of the Regimental Sergeant-Major and the Colour-Sergeants, who had their dignity to keep up.