The Naked Island | Page 5

time, passed Tarzan a milk bottle. I gazed curiously at my
bottle Swan's Blue Black, I noticed.
"What with?" I demanded, at which the orderly looked quite
incredulous and Tarzan flung me, over his vast brown shoulder (a
brown made all the more striking by the white gleam of his buttocks), a
patronizing grin. The orderly explained what with, and simultaneously
Tarzan proudly produced his milk botdeful, so that I could even see
what with. This was a facet of Army life for which I was wholly
unprepared. In fact so far all the facets were facets for which I had been
wholly unprepared.
"Can't be done,' I said.

"Why not?" demanded the orderly.
"Don't feel like it," I explained.
"Don't give me that, mate," said the orderly, disagreeably. "Now come
on: fill it up and I'll test it for sugar."
Although the prospect of being tested for sugar struck me as (so far) the
only interesting event of the entire day, I had, reluctantly, to refuse. I
had to confess, sadly, that at that moment I was as dry as the Sahara:
utterly arid, in fact. There was not the smallest pos sibility of Messrs.
Swan's ink bottle being even dampened. At this, the orderly looked
most ill done by. Tarzan, however, intervened on my behalf.
"The kid's nervous," he said. "Turn on the tap. A running tap'll fix him
up."
The orderly, though obviously aggrieved, was a good-natured lad and
turned on a tap. He, Tarzan, and two newly arrived recruits watched my
reactions with absorbed interest. I remained arid. I was not nervous, but
definitely I was arid.
Wanning to his task, the orderly went into the closet in the corner of the
room and gave the chain a lusty pull. There were loud rushing water
noises, but I remained arid.
Tarzan and the other two recruits turned on all the rest of the taps in the
laboratory and at once the room filled with the sound of falling water
but I was unmoved. Three more recruits entered and one of them a
young ex-milkmansuggested whistling. It worked with his spaniel pup,
he said. Soon the whole building resounded to watery splashes and
sibilant and insinuating whistles, as the entire medical staff and a dozen
potential soldiers united in bringing to its successful conclusion
Operation Ink Bottle. But finally, when it be came obvious that my
bottle (the milkman's spaniel notwithstanding) now the cynosure of
twenty pairs of eyes was doomed to remain empty, everyone admitted
failure. Taps were turned off; cisterns slowly refilled and became silent:
even Tarzan desisted from a particularly seductive line of whistle.

There was only one thing to do. I dressed and went out and drank three
chocolate milk shakes. I then returned and filled my bottle with
consummate ease, and was thereupon tested for sugar which turned out
to be not interesting at all, and I still can't remember whether I have it
or not, though one of them I know to be an extremely bad thing.
This done, we were hustled down to the main hall in the barracks to
take the oath, which is the final act of enlistment. The recruiting
sergeant was ponderously jovial as he herded us along.
Like children repeating the alphabet, we mumbled out the phrases of
the oath as they were gabbled at us by an individual whose voice
glowed with all the warmth and patriotic fervour of a manual of
Military Law, And at the second upon which the last word of the oath
fell from our lips, the recruiting sergeant, his bonhomie shed with all
the speed of a heavy coat upon the arrival of a heat wave, started
screaming: "All right now, you blokes git fell in. C nion, c mon. Shake
a leg or you'll be doing some spud-bashing you're not civvies any
longer, you know. * And straight away, to the accom paniment of his
hysterical screams of "Left, right, left, right" and of mutinous backchat
from ourselves, we ambled off.
"Rck it up there, pick it up," screamed the sergeant. "Left . . . Right . . .
Left . , ." But the small squad of recruits only burst into a squall of
abuse and, sturdily ignoring all his instructions, straggled along looking
remarkably un-military.
"Silly old bastard," Tarzan remarked during a comparative lull.
"What's that you said?" bellowed the sergeant, bringing us to a violent
halt.
"I said," stated Tarzan with awful calm, "silly old bastard." And, to
remove all doubts, the milkman added: "He meant youl"
Uproar ensued. Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously. Colour ful
Australian phrases filled the air with lurid insubordination. And into the
midst of this chaos exploded an overwhelming and humour less bellow

which informed us in incontrovertible tones that we were in the Army